Social Role Valorization Training

Description of the workshop: 

This workshop provides an introduction to Social Role Valorization (SRV), using the core themes developed by Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger, considered to be one of the most influential thinkers in the field of mental retardation in the world. Dr. Wolfensberger’s work helped lay the foundation for many current human service trends, including integration, safeguarding of individual rights, and the deinstitutionalization movement. 

SRV is a systematic and universally applicable concept for structuring human services, strongly anchored in the empiricism of psychology, sociology, and long and broad human experience. 

SRV suggests a close relationship between the socially perceived value roles that people hold, and whether people in those roles will be accorded opportunities and other good things of life. Bad things tend to get done to people who are seen in devalued roles, and good things tend to be afforded to people in positively valued roles. 

Topics to be explored will include: the universality of social devaluation; the defining power of roles in people’s lives; strategies for pursuing socially valued roles, or at least less devalued roles, for devalued people, with an aim toward improving their life conditions; enhancement of people’s social images; and enhancement of people’s competencies.