I am a recently retired faculty. Retired not dead. I remain actively engaged in the social work community both in my local area and through several different online platforms.
I've lately come to have some new, and I believe significant concerns about both our practice and academic communities. (Plural, as I see them as increasingly and distinctly separate.) And I wonder at how recent changes in our educational settings may be ill-preparing students and future social workers. (Right up front, I have a real problem with "asynchronous learning." But that's not my issue today.)
We praise a notion of Field Education as a signature pedagogy. Even as it seems the process is being increasingly diluted and diminished.
I am regularly encountering both BSW & MSW students, who are enrolled in on-line social work education and who live at distance from the schools in which they are enrolled and who are having extremely hard times identifying, contacting, informing, and establishing field placement for themselves. Most often with seemingly very little to no assistance from their universities. Some are specifically saying that their schools are NOT helping them. Some of these students live in extremely remote rural locations: and in fairness this is an important issue we need to figure out. Yet others actually reside in (and are seeking placements in) rather close proximity to BSW or MSW programs where the market is already saturated with field placements already arranged and filled by those local colleges and universities.
As a field instructor for 5 different universities over a 20 year period and then "director of field education in a BSW program through initial accreditation and two cycles of reaffirmation, then mentoring the Director of Field in a new MSW program through their initial and second cycle of accreditation, it has always been my understanding that it is the schools obligation to seek, recruit, prepare, qualify and formally associate with both field instructors and field agencies. Am I mistaken? Has this obligation somehow, gone away?
I am repeatedly disappointed by the conversations I'm observing and having online with students trying to find and arrange their own placements who really have no clear notion of what's to be expected of them, and therefore are at significant disadvantage in informing potential field instructors and agency administrators of what's to be expected of them. Many of the students I've encountered seem to understand their internships as unpaid work experiences rather than strategized educational experiences.
Seriously, how can we expect students, particularly first year MSW students who've not even completed an "Introduction to Social Work" course or a comprehensive orientation session covering curricular expectations, to effectively find and arrange an appropriate professional placement? Or perhaps a placement whose focus might be a wee bit broader understanding of social work than "becoming a therapist?"
There is a parallel issue related to online / distant field placements: The CSWE once sought to limit accredited programs that were in particularly close proximity to one another and with potentially overlapping field settings. That notion has apparently gone away. But the notion of overlapping markets (for soliciting students) and service areas (for placing students in agencies,) is now complicated by online programs accepting students who live in distant communities and expect student to find their own placements. Distant communities that may already be saturated with MSW and BSW students in agency-based placements. Distant communities about which the university and faculty may have very little familiarity with social, ethnic, cultural, & geo-political nuances, let alone the availability of appropriate and accessible field placement opportunities.
(Seriously, I am receiving calls and e-mails from former field instructors and former students who are now in practice, asking if I can help find a placement for random students who have cold-called them, desperate to tears, unable to secure a placement. Random students, enrolled "online" in schools I've never heard of or that are a thousand miles away.)
These are all issues that the CSWE really need to be paying attention to.
(As an aside, I did my MSW internship in an agency 140 miles from my university. This was before the internet and cell phones. At the time my university did "block placements, rather than concurrent placements, so students were in field 4.5 days a week. The university had several agency placements in this distant, but large urban area. All of our field instructors were alumni of the university, recruited by the university and who had participated in a 1-2 day field seminar each year, on campus with students. And one field instructor was employed & paid as an adjunct faculty to conduct a local "field seminar" course one evening a week for the 8 or 9 students in that area. So with that as a basis for my practice, I DO have some expectations.)
I'll see you in Kansas City in October!
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Gary Bachman
Professor Emeritus
Park University
Parkville MO
913-634-4976
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