Field Directors

Thank you for posting this request. I'm sorry that I have nothing to offer in your situation, except my appreciation for your effort. I sincerely hope you might be successful in this quest.

Although recently retired I am still very active on social media and in "board work" with multiple community-based agencies. 

Over the past year I have found myself increasingly...angered, by the numbers of both BSW & MSW students I am encountering on-line,  who are struggling on their own to find and arrange field placements around the country without any seeming guidance from their college or university.  And then there is a similar number of students encountering challenges in their "approved" placements, but where-in these new field instructors and program managers seem to have very little insight, guidance, or commitment to meeting the expectations for field instruction set by the CSWE. Or to unfamiliar schools 500 to a thousand miles distant.

For over a 20 year period, I was a volunteer agency-based instructor for 5 different universities, working with BSWs, foundation year MSW's and Advanced Practice Year MSWs.  Forty-five students in all.   I then had an opportunity to help build a totally new BSW program through initial candidacy. Ten years later we added a MSW program. I was Director of Field / Practicum Education for 13 years and served as a faculty liaison for an additional 5 years.  My heart is in the agency-based learning experience.   This is supposedly our "signature pedagogy."

What has become of the roll of the Director of Practice (or field) Education?

I strongly feel that social work education is seriously failing MANY of the students relying upon us for their professional education.  There is the old notion that "we don't know what we don't know."  I am almost daily encountering students on their own to arrange placements based upon what little they actually know about social work tacks and professional tracks.   

I have been wanting to post this comment for some-time, but although retired, I find my time now being consumed by state and national politics.  I dread that we are a nation struggling with significant threats. And as a social worker, I remain acutely aware that individuals and populations long recognized as vulnerability are now facing even greater burdens. And clear threats.  And as social work educators, when we fail students, we fail the profession. And as the profession fails,  people are increasingly vulnerable, marginalized, burdened, divided, and threatened.

There  are consequences for our failures.

Gary Bachman MSSW,