B.
Vijaya Lakshmi*
Field
education has always been an integral component of social work education,
recognized as having a major impact on graduates' preparation for professional
practice.
-
Wayne, Raskin & Bogo, 2006:161.
Abstract
Fieldwork
in social work education is considered as its “signature pedagogy” and much has
been written about its indispensability. Though all the social work educators
accept it in principle, when it comes to practice, most often the quality of
fieldwork training offered to the student leaves much to be desired. This
situation needs to be corrected by taking urgent steps for achieving excellence
in social work practice.
Introduction
When the National conference of
charities and corrections in Baltimore USA was organized in 1915, the main
concern of the organizers was to have professional status to the products of
schools of social work so as to lend credibility and recognition to their
position as social workers. The social work educators of those days might have
felt that, a word in support from Flexner (1915), the most influential
individual at that time in the United States in the area of professional education,
would bestow the much needed professional status for social work as his
pronouncements were considered to be endowed with the "weight and
authority of scientific truth" (Austin, 1983:357). But it was not to be. While
proposing six qualities required for an academic programme to be recognized as
a profession, Flexner (1915) felt that social work was not a full profession as
it did not possess all those six qualities.
In spite of Flexner's (1915)
statement about social work not being a full profession, there have been
efforts to establish the professional status of social work (Greenwood, 1957). In
a way, Flexner's comments prodded social workers of those times to attend to
the lacunae pointed out by him with regard to the professional status of social
work. As history has to show, fieldwork played a crucial role in validating social work education's stance in seeking a professional
status. As such, this article strives to bring out the importance of fieldwork
keeping in view the objectives of social work education and the effects of
fieldwork on the same not being taken seriously.
For this purpose, the article is
divided into 3 sections. Section I relates the importance of the different
components of fieldwork in social work training. In Section II, a critical
analysis of the fieldwork scenario in contemporary social work education will
be done which is followed by Section III that covers the conclusions.
Section
I
One of the hallmarks of a
profession is the transfer of knowledge and skills under supervisory guidance
to its entrants. Social work since the beginning has
been utilizing field instruction as a tool to train future social workers. When
we look at the history of social work education, the two pioneering programmes
that come to our mind are Chicago School and New York School. Both the schools had
initiated training programmes for those engaged in social services and philanthropy
in 1895 and 1898 respectively. The Chicago School, the then School of Social
Economics (SSE) started informal conference sessions for settlement workers,
and fieldwork was in the form of visits to Hull House and such similar organisations.
The absence of an elaborate formal fieldwork may be because all the
participants were practitioners. Coming to the New York Programme, fieldwork
was always a part of its academic activity and is the foundation of
professional education for social work (Lee et al 1931:184). In New York
programme, the quantum of fieldwork was increased gradually, from 12 half days
in 1898 to 10 hours per week for 6 months in 1916. The placement of the
students was in the Charity Organisation Society. In 1919, it became New York
School of Social Work (Coohey 1999: 420).
Two instances that highlight the importance
given to fieldwork by the pioneers of social work education are: when efforts
were made to make the New York Programme an academic unit of the University of Columbia,
there was an initial resistance and the concern was that the programme might
lose its emphasis on fieldwork and would become too theoretical. Similarly,
when Chicago School planned to affiliate itself with the University of Chicago,
Russell Sage Foundation withdrew a promised grant to Chicago School indicating
its opposition to the proposed move (Austin, 1983).
The
Place of Fieldwork in Social Work
The primacy of practice
placements and learning by doing is well documented within the literature of
social work education and reflected in the statements such as "the
importance of field instruction is axiomatic" (Shatz, 1989, xxv), "it
is indispensable" ( Bloom, 1963:3) "the quality of social work
education is dependent on field education" (Jarman Rohde et al, 1997: 43).
Traditionally, the class room and
field setting have been and continue to be the locus of social work education and
the linkage between the two is its ultimate goal i.e. while class room teaching
tends to emphasize the acquisition of knowledge and attitudes, teaching in
field tends to stress primarily on the translation of these into learning
skills (Lowy, Blocksberg and Walberg, 1971; and Devi Prasad and Vijaya Lakshmi,
1997)
What is fieldwork? Broadly, it
can be defined as work in the field. However, in social work education, the
definition focuses on what the field can do to learning. Thus, the field in
social work can be identified as the context for practice, the context being
the specific area/ the sector of social work operation. The work can be any act
of a social worker that emanates from a conscious and purposeful use of his/her
self, directed towards ameliorative and structured change within a context
(Bodhi, 2012). Thus, fieldwork in social work education can be defined as the
process of enabling a student to acquire skills, values and attitudes in the
backdrop of knowledge covering a specific practice setting, with a social work
perspective.
Fieldwork plays a critical role
in social work education by providing initial opportunities to the students for
them to engage in the applied use of their newly acquired knowledge, skills and
abilities (Spitzer et al, 2001). According to Manshardt (1985:3):
“the purpose of fieldwork is ...
to clarify technical instruction. Just as the botanist goes into the fields to
study plants and flowers to supplement his text book knowledge, and just as the
geologist turns from a study of books to the study of rocks, so the social
worker goes from the classroom to the appropriate fieldwork activity, using the
fieldwork as a means of clarifying and adding point to the class room
instruction.”
While this statement is true, we
have to elaborate it a little further to explain the nature of fieldwork in
social work education, as fieldwork in social work encompasses this and more.
Social work being a human service profession, the practitioners should also essentially
possess a professional, self-embodying, appropriate attitudes and values
along with the required knowledge and skills. In other words, education
in social work takes into account not only the technical knowledge and skills
but also the attitudes of the practitioners and their philosophy of practice (Banerjee,
1975). Fieldwork facilitates the development of this orientation in the student.
Components of Fieldwork in Social
Work Education and their Significance
The three essential components of
fieldwork are: i) The School/Department
of Social Work, ii) The Student, and iii) The Field /Place.
i) The School/Department of
Social Work
The principal actors in the
school setting are the social work faculty members who simultaneously act as
class room teachers and field instructors. Their quality and characteristics
are vital in creating a conducive learning environment in the school.
While there are three criteria
for classifying a school as excellent (TFQGSE[1],
1986, 77), the foremost among them is indicated as the transmission of knowledge, skills and
values to the students so as to transform them into professional social
workers. The other two are - the
development of knowledge through systematic enquiry (research), and the
application of knowledge to deal with social issues (practice). Many a times,
during the accreditation of schools, the second aspect i.e research takes
precedence too often at the expense of the first criterion i.e the mentoring
aspect. It has been observed that when there is emphasis on scholarly work such
as research publications, faculty members' interest on and commitment to field training
activities seem to lessen as a result of which there is a diminished engagement
of faculty members with fieldwork (Kilpatrick et al, 1994).
The school plays a pivotal role
in ensuring the quality of fieldwork being offered to the student. The goal of
a social work school is not just transferring knowledge but creating
opportunities for the students to experiment with it. Apart from understanding
the meaning of a theoretical concept, the student has to examine it in a
practice situation. The degree of preparation of the students in terms of
mastering the specialized bodies of knowledge, identifying the tasks to be
performed and the best way of performing them depends on the educational
environment of the school.
Such a learning environment is
created by social work faculty supervisors having knowledge of and skill in the
use of social work methods, critical and up-to-date information on changing
socio-political trends, social policy and programmes for the needy. They can be role models to the students, and inculcate
values of the profession among the students.
By hands on demonstration, guidance, and encouraging critical assessment,
the supervisors help the students acquire practice skills. According to
Banerjee (1975), social work profession emphasises the cultivation of four
competencies (if they can be termed so) among social work practitioners i.e. knowing (acquiring professional
knowledge), feeling (awareness of emotion),
doing and being. While training the students, inculcation of competencies in
these four areas is the responsibility of the fieldwork supervisor.
ii) The Student
Students are important
stakeholders in an academic institution. The students of a professional
discipline are its flag-bearers and they need to possess certain qualities to carry
on that responsibility. The first is the aptitude to serve people in the
absence of which they may not be able to develop the other attribute, empathy
which is essential for a social worker. The most desired status of being a
member of a profession is attained by undergoing a long course of instruction
and supervised practice. The neophyte in any profession goes through a series
of rites de passage before becoming a
full-fledged member. These rites de
passage consist of a series of instructions, ceremonies and ordeals through
which those already in the profession
initiate the new entrants into their circle. By this, the initiators
turn the initiated into people fit to be their own companions and successors
(Becker, 1961:4). According to the Task Force on Quality in Graduate Social
Work Education (1986:78), in seeking excellence, a school must bring into its
programme students with strong academic background reflecting specific
knowledge, skills, and abilities. Accordingly, it recommended the following
five factors for consideration while admitting the students into the programme.
They are:
- Capacity
to learn and participate in and contribute to the education process
- Diversity
of backgrounds
- Potential
to grow into an effective practitioner
- Analytical
and communication skills, and
- Personal and technical skills for making use of the
educational experience offered by the school.
Since values are considered by
many social work authors to be central to educating students, there should be a
conscious effort to inculcate such values in the student (Merdinger, 1982:12). In social work, fieldwork, a structured experience
provides experiential learning. It is a 'deliberately arranged experience'
(Singh, 1985). The students have to be provided with appropriate opportunities
to be aware of the values that are indispensable for professional practice so
that they internalize those values and develop skills in adhering to them in
their practice.
By providing explicit focus on building
values during fieldwork training, the students are helped to develop a
professional self. The fieldwork supervisors play the role of initiators of the
students into the profession. At the end of the training, the students develop
an expertise which is reflected in the form of their capacity to understand a
situation located in history, ability to collect relevant information,
substantiate one’s arguments, see and differentiate between right and wrong in
a given circumstance, and inculcate the capacity to make valid conclusions
about a situation vis-a-vis their
position (Bodhi, 2012). In other words,
these values would guide the students to consistently choose particular types
of behaviours, - behaviours appropriate for a professional social worker,
whenever alternatives are offered.
All the important players in
social work education - the schools, faculty supervisors and agencies have to
keep in mind that as in the case of medical education, education in social work
is not an end in itself. Most students who join in social work institutions do
so not just to get a degree but to join organizations dealing with vulnerable
groups, provision of welfare services, and programme planning or
administration. As these students, after leaving the school are required to work
with institutions and systems to make them work for the marginalized, they have
to develop a perspective for practice. It is necessary to enable the students
to use the theoretical knowledge to be “plundered and fragmented” (England,
1986: 35) so as to understand the varied situations faced by them in the field.
This would enable them to develop skills in relating with field practice which
includes exploring, summarizing and clarifying what is observed.
In the process, care has to be
taken not to expose the students to the three objectionable types of fieldwork
supervision (Secker, 1993). They are - constrictive (supervisors' imposition of
their own theoretical perspectives on the students' work), unsupportive
(exhibition of coldness and hostility toward the student) and being aloof
(giving too little direction to the student). There must be a balance between
too much and too little direction as a student needs optimal direction.
Secker (1993) aptly captures the
dilemma of a social work student while trying to relate theory to practice.
...you get sociology thrown at
you, you get psychology thrown at you, you get social policy thrown at you,...
and then you get twenty-seven client groups thrown at you. Now there may be a
lot of information there that's useful and valid, but there's no way of linking
it together. It's all divided up separately and I find it difficult to learn
from that. I needed a map, something to make it make sense (p.108).
This shows the need of the
student to have direction in relating class room teaching to field situation,
and it is the supervisor who provides this direction.
iii) The Field
The field can be an organisation,
or a community. It is the space where
the whole action of field training takes place. Ideally the professional social
workers on the pay role of these organisations are expected to be acting as
supervisors for the students placed in their organisations and they are termed,
agency supervisors. In instances where the practitioners are non-social
workers, social work schools have evolved criteria (such as for ex. five years
of continuous service in the related social field) to confer eligibility to be
the agency based supervisors to guide students. Being in practice and in close touch with the
field, they are in a position to impart the skills needed for a social worker
in the training. Hence, they form an
important component of the training milieu provided to the student.
While selecting the field setting,
the school/department and in particular the faculty supervisor needs to see to
it that the institution/community identified to be a fieldwork setting does
provide the opportunities required for training. The students' training needs
have to be matched with the opportunities in the field on individual student
basis. Further, the environment in the field impacts the quality of training
given to the student. It comprises of two types: a) Inter-personal, and b) Physical.
a)
Inter-personal. Secker
(1993, 131) suggested that a helpful
interpersonal learning milieu consists of 4 aspects. They are:
- The
contribution made to the students' learning by staff members.
- Pressure
of work in the institution concerned
- The
ethos and the way things were carried within those institutions, and
- The
availability of role models.
b) Physical.
Placement
physicality can be a factor in the success or failure of the students with
regard to their fieldwork. It has been observed that the significance of place
for students, practice assessors, and tutors are deeply enmeshed with personal
values, beliefs and identity (Wilkinson and
Bissell, 2005, 285). When students perceive the place in a positive manner, they
feel ownership of the place and it becomes the first step toward the creation
of an atmosphere which is conducive for students' learning. Taking into
consideration Schilpp's (1957) view, one can assume that when there is harmony
between the students and the place, they feel at home because the students fit
into the landscape. The place should prevent the need for confrontation and be
student-friendly so that the students do not feel alienated and intimidated. It
has been reported (Godkin, 1980) that if a person feels that s/he does not
belong to a place, that place will be perceived by him/her as threatening as
it interferes with the person's integrity and identity. While selecting organisations
for placement, the fieldwork coordinators need to ensure the safety and
security of the students.
Before sending the students to
the organisations for fieldwork, they need to be briefed about the organisation
both by the faculty supervisor and by the student placed there earlier. It
would be beneficial to the students if a map indicating the location of the organisation
is provided to them. The training opportunities identified for the students
need to be such that they are provided with a perspective - the perspective of
social work. More often than not, in India the organisations identified as fieldwork
agencies have no professional social workers on their pay role and sometimes
though they are there, these social workers are not in a position to spare time
to guide and supervise the students due to their heavy workload. In such a
context, the faculty supervisors have to take additional responsibility to fill
the void.
Section
II
Fieldwork
in Social Work Education in India-Current Scenario
So far, we have examined the
nature of fieldwork, its components and the role of fieldwork in the transformation
of a student into a professional social worker. To a large extent, the above narrative
presents an ideal situation. However, a look at the current scenario of social
work education in India portrays a different picture. Evidence shows (Nadkarni and Desai 2012; Nair, 2014) shows that there has been a
sharp decline in the standards of both class room teaching and fieldwork
training, much more so in the latter.
Many factors contributed to such a situation. Noteworthy among them are the changes
that took place in the constituents i.e. i) the students, ii) the
schools/departments and iii) the field settings. To my mind, this is the order
in which the changes which took place in one constituency, affected the
remaining in that order. Therefore, I prefer to discuss the changes in the same
order.
i) The Students
For an educational institution
which is committed to the task of teaching and training its students, the
quality of the students who apply and are admitted is an important factor as it
will, to a large extent, determine how effectively they could be trained. Therefore, there is always competition on the
part of the educational institutions to get the best students. But, as the best
students have an advantage of getting admission in academic institutions of
their choice, where they enrol themselves depends on the status enjoyed by the
institution and the job opportunities available after graduation.
Of late, an overriding importance
is given to the STEM (Science, technology, engineering and medicine)
disciplines because of the employment opportunities available in those areas.
As a result social sciences in India are unable to attract good students to
their fold. Also, as education sector became an area for profitable business,
whenever a discipline opens up higher job opportunities for its entrants there
is mushrooming of colleges offering courses in those disciplines. The same
happened in the case of STEM disciplines especially the discipline of engineering.
As a result there is a rapid increase in the number of engineering colleges
which are offering seats at times over and above the available number of eligible
candidates. Under these circumstances any student who clears the engineering
entrance examination with a minimum score is assured admission in a college.
Further, there has been an
overwhelming demand for engineering education and because of this 'craze', over
the last few years, better students were drawn into its stream leaving the
leftover pool of students to be chosen from, by the other disciplines. Though
the situation of social work is slightly better compared to most of the other
social science disciplines and humanities, here too mushrooming of colleges
offering social work led to admission of all and sundry into the social work colleges
offering mediocre training. The quality of education in many of the newly
established social work colleges leaves much to be desired. Another aspect that
contributed to the trend of indiscriminate admission of students is the policy
of fees reimbursement to certain students by governments in states such as the
erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu etc. Most of the social work programmes started in
private un-aided colleges are interested in the fee reimbursement given to
these students rather than providing adequate training to them. There are
instances where students are attracted with a promise from the college management
that they need not attend fieldwork, and classroom attendance is manipulated. Thus,
fieldwork became the casualty of these changes.
This would also explain why the
quality of the students admitted into most of the schools/departments of social
work is not up to the mark. Further, many of them lack the motivation needed to
develop themselves into professional social workers. While talking about the
professional socialization of medical students and their anxiety to gain hands
on training while being posted in the clinical settings, Becker et al (1961)
indicate that these students strive to learn by doing and this desire in these
students is due to their awareness from the beginning that after they graduate
from the medical school they have to perform. They also reportedly appreciated
teachers who gave practical tips from their experience of dealing with cases
than those giving mere theoretical lectures, however eloquent they may be.
ii) The Schools/Departments of
Social Work
This covers three areas - the
faculty, mode of teaching, and the fieldwork evaluation process.
The
Faculty. Majority of the schools of social work in the
private sector are driven by profit motive than by their commitment to social
work education. Added to the poor quality of the students being admitted, these
colleges are also understaffed. As the
faculty members are underpaid, these colleges could not attract the best of the
faculty. Coming to the Departments of social work in the state universities,
the vacancies arising regularly due to the retirement of the senior faculty
members are not filled because of the financial constraints and the teaching is
done by the teaching assistants – ad-hoc teachers appointed on contractual
basis on a consolidated pay. This again is a limiting factor in terms of the
quality of the faculty and their continued commitment for excellence in social
work education.
Because of the above
circumstances, in most of the social work schools/departments, the focus at
best is on class room teaching to the neglect or abandonment of fieldwork
training. Fieldwork to be effective as a curricular programme needs focus on important
aspects such as placement of students in the agencies, overseeing of agency
school liaison, regular conduct of supervisory conferences, and going through fieldwork
reports submitted by the students. In the absence of proper planning and organization
of these activities, fieldwork training becomes inadequate. As a result, the
required professional socialization of the students does not take place. As
pointed out by Smalley (1969), abandoning individual supervision in field
instruction is likely retard social work's development as a profession. Once, I
had the 'fortune' of being an external examiner of fieldwork of students
belonging to a certain university department. Majority of these students
presented their day's fieldwork (of 3 hours duration!) in a paragraph
consisting of not more than six sentences. The first and the last sentences of
the recording stated the reporting and departure timings of the student to and
from the fieldwork agency. The middle 3 or 4 sentences were about their work.
This was the pattern followed throughout their records. One can imagine the
'depth' of such reports and the 'purpose' they serve!
Students should be encouraged to
write reflective records indicating their progressive learning of complex
interactional processes and their increasing awareness of the use of self in
working with the people (Desai, 1975). When students' records are not
meticulously gone through by the supervisor and appropriate linkages between
the theoretical knowledge and field situation as per the documented information
is not discussed, how can the students relate theory to practice and
consequently translate theory into practice?
The supervisory conference has a
dual purpose. On the one hand it is aimed at enabling the students to identify
the practice skills, and on the other it helps the teacher to monitor the
student's journey toward the attainment of a professional self. It is quite
unfortunate that fieldwork in general and fieldwork conferences in particular became
rituals and lifeless routine activities defeating the very purpose for which
fieldwork is made a mandatory curricular activity in social work education. At
times, it seems that the faculty supervisors themselves neither appreciated the
philosophy of fieldwork nor inculcated its spirit. Most often the inability of
the supervisors to inculcate in the students the indispensability of fieldwork
and the seriousness and commitment with which they have to engage with it
results from this apathy and indifference of the faculty supervisors toward
fieldwork.
A social work educator becomes an
effective supervisor only if s/he has an up-to-date knowledge of social work skills,
and their application in the field practice. In other words, s/he should be a
practitioner too. Secker's (1993) study emphatically brought out the importance
of having practice teachers as role models for the students. According to one
of her respondents, a final year student of social work:
Working with elderly people was
not something I had experience of. So my
supervisor arranged for me to 'shadow' a member of the elderly team. That was
very useful...When we went to the day care unit, it was really interesting of
watching the interactions and how he tackled that. It was very illuminating to
see that you can actually bring up some quite touchy subjects...The way he handled
that I thought was excellent. I learnt a lot there that turned out to be very
useful... (pp.135-136).
According to another student
respondent:
...My joint supervisors were
wonderful. Every time they saw a family, the whole team watched, so I got to see
a lot of work, and seeing that, and seeing it actually work, that has really
been helpful with this placement. In this placement I have been able to put
into practice what I learnt... (p.136).
Unfortunately, most of the social
work educators in India are not practitioners in the sense that they do not
actively intervene in field situations. Hence, to that extent they lack
practice knowledge. Such teachers cannot effectively relate theory to practice
and vice-versa. Generally, the agency based supervisors themselves being
professional social workers engaged in field practice are expected to fill this
gap by guiding the students placed with them in the agency. However, in India
most often than not we do not have trained social workers in the field settings
where we place our students for training. On rare occasions though they are
present, their case load prevents their effective participation in the training
of the students.
One way of rectifying this
situation is the participation of the faculty supervisors in the agencies' work
in terms of taking cases for direct practice (Banerjee 1975). Another important
way is that the faculty supervisors practice through the students placed under
their supervision, which I found useful to the supervisor, to be in touch with
the changing field realities. This is possible only
when the faculty supervisors encourage their students to do process
documentation, themselves participate in the intervention sessions, go through the
students' records meticulously, take weekly supervisory conferences and enable
the students to link the theoretical knowledge to field situation.
Another way to deal with the issue
of faculty supervisors' lack of practice experience is to invite social work practitioners
to the class room to address the students. They may be requested to explain to the students how they
have dealt with a specific field situation using social work knowledge,
practice principles, and under what circumstances there are exceptions, if any,
to the application of theoretical knowledge to practice situations. Screening
videos of interviews/practice sessions conducted by practitioners and role
plays will also be quite useful.
The University Grants Commission
(UGC) is sanctioning Research support programmes to social work departments
under which financial assistance is given to start field action programmes.
These can also be put into good use to train the students.
Mode
of Teaching. The entry of distance mode of learning to
impart social work education has a serious impact on field instruction in
social work. While distance education
enables a large number of students to be benefitted, adaption of such
educational practices in professional social work has to be gauged with
caution. In social work education, the face to face interaction with the
fieldwork supervisor and the regular supervisory guidance which the supervisor
provided during the conferences are necessary for lay students to transform themselves
into professional social workers. Therefore, the regular face to face contact
with students cannot be done away with. For
most of the universities, one of the noble motive for offering education
through distance mode is to reach out to a large number of students who cannot otherwise
attend regular classes due to time and distance constraints. In some instances,
this mode became a great source of income - an income many times more than these
universities get from their regular students.
If the courses offered through
distance mode do not need any practical training aimed at the transformation of the student to become a
professional, then there is not much the university can lose in terms of
quality of education. However, social work being a profession, the educational
programme needs to be organized in such a way that it facilitates appropriate transfer
of knowledge and skills through field instruction. Field instruction is thus
indispensable and it is only through closely monitored fieldwork guidance that the
students attain professional socialization and acquire skills, values and
attitudes required of a human service professional. Social Work education has a
mandate to prepare future practitioners by enabling them to undergo
professional socialization in an atmosphere of anticipatory socialization. Anticipatory
socialization, according to Merton (1968:319), enables the individuals to
imbibe the values of a group to which they wish to belong but do not belong.
The distance education programmes
in social work being offered by most of the Universities are following the same
mode of academic activity as is done for other social sciences i.e. arranging
class room instruction for a short duration and providing learning material
prepared by subject experts. In addition to the above, the students of social
work are placed in the agencies situated in their geographical localities after
providing certain guidelines. The reports prepared by the students on the basis
of their fieldwork are sent to the concerned coordinator which is evaluated by
examiners. There is no active guidance to and supervision of the students while
they are in the field. Hence, it is a question mark about the acquisition of
the needed skills, values and attitudes.
Even in the west where the
distance mode of education seems to be prevalent, the most frequent courses offered
via distance learning are 'non interactive' courses such as social welfare
policy, and research. This is because the context of these courses lends to
lecture presentation and easier to be launched. However, courses which
emphasise the development of students' relationships and interaction skills are
not offered through distance education (Siegel et al, 1998). These, include
methods or practice courses. Irrespective of the enthusiasm of the universities
to offer courses in social work through distance learning, the quality of
social work education and the way the programme has to be delivered cannot be
compromised.
In the USA, where the distance
mode is popular, offering social work through distance mode was not embraced by
a majority of social work educators (Siegel et at 1998). Difficulty in having
student-faculty contact is one of the important reasons. There are also arguments
in favour of distance education. However, this can be done only by using
advanced technologies like TV studio, satellite transmission, fibre optic
transmission, and educational platforms such as moodle, Skylab etc. A majority
of the distance education programmes in social work offered by the Indian universities
neither possesses these technologies nor their faculty are trained in it. Under
these circumstances, offering social work through distance learning is nothing
but compromising on the quality of social work programme especially in relation
to fieldwork.
Fieldwork
Evaluation. The seriousness with which the evaluation of
an activity is done would communicate to the person being evaluated the
importance of the activity. While our classroom teaching and evaluation of
class work have developed well, there still exists a great chasm between the
way fieldwork is done and being evaluated. It has been argued that ‘the failure
to develop the later at a corresponding tempo and to theoretically
conceptualize to provide adequate opportunities to transform theory into
practice and the consequent measures on the basis of which the final evaluation
is done makes the whole process of fieldwork evaluation a mere exercise in
futility' (Mehta 1975:335). In most of the schools/departments of social work, the
fieldwork evaluation of the student is carried out at the semester/year end. If
the fieldwork is meant to inculcate skills and attitudes, and develop ability
to use knowledge at the field level, continuous evaluation is necessary so that
the students can make efforts to improve their performance. In the absence of
regular feedback on their performance in the field through supervisory
conferences, evaluation only at the end of the year/semester is of limited value.
Fieldwork in Social work
education is not task centred but process centred. Many a times, during
fieldwork evaluation, the teachers list out the tasks performed by the students
under their supervision without looking into such details as the use of social
work knowledge and skills and the steps taken to perform the tasks. Such
evaluations are of little use in terms of assessing the student's growth as a
professional social worker because what is important is whether the task is
done keeping in view the social work perspective or not. To be of advantage, the
whole process of evaluation has to direct itself to achieve this goal.
Applying the 4 broad categories
developed by Hunt and Kogan (1950) for assessing the clients' movement during
the social work process, Tangavelu (1975, 364) proposed the following criteria
for the evaluation of students' fieldwork.
a)
Verbalization:
How the students talk about their clients, groups and their experiences with
them, progressing from lay description to more interpretation of problems and
peoples' reactions.
b)
Habits:
The students' approach to their obligations and assignments; how they function,
what they do; and reasons for their actions.
c)
Attitudes
and Understanding: (stress-tolerance components). The students' reactions to
pressure and capacity to resist deteriorating effects of stress, how they cope
with frustration; and their ability to make use of new relationships and
experiences.
d)
Changes
in Environmental situations: Readiness to contribute, to build rather than
destroy, and to view the world as a friendly, not hostile place. The
assimilation of a set of values in keeping with fundamental ideals of a 'good
society'.
iii) The Field
Setting
As already pointed out, the field
setting is a place where the whole activity of fieldwork takes place. Earlier
the field settings are generally the institutions. For the schools/departments
of social work in smaller towns, where private colleges are started it may be
difficult to find a correctional institution, a mental hospital etc.
Complaining that such institutions are absent for placing students is futile.
The faculty supervisors have to be ingenious in the identification of the
appropriate agencies for placement of students. A yearly survey of the
geographical locality where the school is located is necessary to identify the
agencies. For e.g. it may be a school, a PHC or a colony of people belonging to
disadvantaged groups. By discussing with the key stakeholders the important
areas needing social work intervention can be identified and students are
appropriately placed. Placing students in agencies without proper pilot survey may
be of no help and does not meet the goals of fieldwork in social work.
Because of the inability to
identify appropriate institutions for the placement of students, the faculty
members tend to feel that there are not enough agencies to place the students and
hence more than one student is placed in an agency leading to difficulty at the
time of evaluation when their area of functioning is not demarcated from the
beginning. When individual placements are not possible, the areas of work may
be clearly demarcated and the students be placed under the same faculty
supervisor to prevent overlapping of work.
It is advisable to take up yearly
review of the agencies in terms of their suitability to train the students and delete
those agencies which are not meeting the
training needs of students, from the list of placements. The present tendency of
some of the schools to place the students for decades in the same agencies without evaluating them
is clearly a bad practice. Because of the changing scenario of the functioning
of NGOs due to the decline in foreign funding on which many NGOs depend, the
very existence of these NGOs is threatened. This is going to have an impact on
the selection of agencies.
Section III
Conclusion
and what can be done?
Fieldwork, though hailed as
social work's signature pedagogy and an indispensible component of social work
curriculum, did not receive the attention it deserved from social work
educators. The planning and evaluation of fieldwork as a curricular activity
continue to elude us since the origin of social work education. Abbotts (1942) reflections on our inability to
make fieldwork truly educational in spite of the acceptance by all social
workers of its importance and also the failure of social work educators to
analyze its educational content and the method of securing proper education
results continue to hold good even after more than seven decades of the
existence of the profession. As pointed out by Jenkins and Sheator (1982):
Social work education has been
unable or unwilling to submit the field instruction process to disciplined
evaluation and therefore, it has not generated adequate literature to become an
appropriately creditable part of higher education (pp. 3-4).
The absence of a standardized
syllabus for fieldwork and its evaluation resulted in flaws that allow
deviations to such an extent that without going through the rigour of the most
important aspect of social work education - the fieldwork- the students are
awarded degrees in social work. It should not be allowed for any longer as
these half baked products bring down the academic and practice excellence of
professional social work. Hence let us bring back 'field' to fieldwork in
social work education.
Acknowledgements
I
thank Prof B Devi Prasad for his helpful comments on the paper.
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