Journal on Developmental Disabilities

My name is Jodie, and I am a vocational counselor at the Chilliwack Society of Community Living where I work with participants finding their dream job. I have been working in the social service field for over 30 years and reside in the lovely community of Rosedale British Columbia.

This reflective paper examines how direct support professional (DSP) experience functions as a foundational site of learning within social work education. Drawing on our shared DSP backgrounds and guided by Schön’s (1983) reflective practice and Fook’s (2012) model of critical reflection, we analyze how frontline disability support work generates relational, ethical, and practice‑based knowledge that is often undervalued within formal curricula. We highlight the complexity of DSP practice, including relational labour, advocacy, and moment‑to‑moment ethical decision‑making, while also acknowledging the tensions of care and control embedded in institutional systems shaped by ableism, colonialism, and risk‑averse policies. Our reflections illustrate how DSP experience enriches peer learning, exposes gaps in social work curricula related to intellectual and developmental disability, and reveals forms of epistemic injustice that marginalize experiential knowledge. We argue that integrating DSP perspectives can strengthen social work education by foregrounding disability, power, relational ethics, and the structural conditions that shape frontline practice.