(with some input from Field Council members' consortia)
Field education is the signature pedagogy of social work. Lee Shulman (2005) labels a profession's characteristic form of teaching and learning its signature pedagogy. He bases this concept in the three dimensions of professional practice: thinking the intellectual aspects of a profession's knowledge base; performing the technical aspects or the profession's skills; and acting with integrity the moral aspect or a profession's values and ethics. How a profession goes about teaching these three dimensions is its signature pedagogy. Examples of signature pedagogies include: the clinical rounds of medicine, the design studios of architecture and mechanical engineering, the legal case method of law, and student teaching in teacher education.
- Purpose of Field Education Curriculum:
The major purpose of the field education curriculum in a school of social work is to develop a social work practitioner who: 1) is grounded in the knowledge and values base of the social work profession, 2) uses the knowledge base to guide his or her interventions with clients and client systems, and 3) evaluates the outcomes of his or her interventions in order to improve them. This requires the ability able to use knowledge, values, theory, problem solving skills, and affect to inform his or her practice. In the field placement, the student develops those essential critical thinking abilities that come about through reflection in action (Schon, 1987). - Content of Field Education Curriculum:
The overriding purpose of every field work curriculum is the development of a professional social worker who can enter the practice arena in any setting or field of practice even though each school has a unique curriculum related to their own mission, community needs and faculty strengths.
However, despite the unique differences among schools' curricula, there are common elements that must be contained in any field curriculum:- Students must be seeing real clients and client systems.
- Students must be doing real social work with them.
- Students' practice must be grounded in the knowledge base and values of the profession with the ability to identify and label skills and justify their use.
- Field instruction must be grounded in the knowledge base and values of the profession.
- Students work with real clients students requires them to confront and deal with their own affects and values related issues as they emerge in the work.
- Students must develop skills in critical thinking and the ability to be reflective about integration of theory and practice as it applies to the real case before them.
- Strategies for the Present:
Field work is the prominent and central guiding force in the educational process and should re-infuse the curriculum and the nature of social work practice itself.
Dewey's (1948) classic ideas about learning persist (Cremin, 1961). The scientific paradigm of knowledge which supports the separation of learning and doing is not effective for social work (Goldstein, 1993, p. 173). Kuhn informs us that this separation has never been effective for physics and biology, and Berger and Luckman (1967) follow suit by noting the inseparability of observation and critical thinking in the social sciences. A social worker does not identify one answer to one problem in working with a client. A reflective practitioner critically entertains various options and helps the client to find possible solutions and approaches to a problem.
Social workers must also experience the client. The social worker is involved in an affective exchange with a client, and this experience and flow of affect with the client can never be replicated no matter how many simulations the students enacts, or case studies the student considers. Only in the in vivo field experience will this exchange of affect occur. Affective education should also occur in the classroom, and instructors should be guided by humanistic designs (Rogers, 1969; Brown, 1976). Classroom designs should all revolve around integration of the field experience with the classroom one. Yet we must recognize that in the classroom, any design that attempts to replicate the client-student interaction will always be just that a replication. While it has the potential to prepare the student, it can never replace the live exchange between the student and the real client. (Indeed, NASA uses complex simulations to prepare astronauts for weightlessness, but the awe inspiring thrill of entering space can never be replicated in the laboratory.)
It is in this exchange that the student experiences the struggle to respond by using social work knowledge, skill and technique effectively. The social worker calls upon empathic awareness, brings cognition to the process, in order to formulate a coherent yet necessarily changeable assessment, that enhances how the client makes sense of their situation. The student must be prepared to do all of this when involved with the client, be that client an individual, group, family, community or organization.
Goldstein too notes that the real life emergencies and paradoxes of field placement with client, agency planners, and community, all determine the context of this educational experience. Students learn in this context that absolutes and "shoulds" must be abandoned.
Goldstein in no way suggests field education is broken due to inadequate and unskilled field instructors or diminished resources. His focus is on the imperative to design curricula which integrate experience and knowledge rather than those which subsume experience in favor of the scientific paradigm.
In this section we will identify guiding principles for curriculum design that emanate from the centrality of field education as the signature pedagogy of social work education. These principles will be related to relevant curricular domains; they should be reviewed differentially as to the unique and generic mission of each school. The integrated paradigm for field education will be considered through the lens of the eight essential domains of social work education as identified by COCEI:
Domain 1: Procedural Knowledge defined by conceptual and analytical reasoning;
Domain 2-6: Content Knowledge in (2) diversity, (3) research - science to service, (4) models of social work practice, (5) human behavior and the social environment, (6) ethical principles and decision making;
Domain 7: Self Knowledge and self-awareness; and
Domain 8: Practice Competencies defined by effective action with individuals, families, groups, organizations, & communities.
Principles for Curriculum Design with Field Education as the Signature Pedagogy for Social Work Education
Principle 1: Field education is the primary :interface between the school, the agency, and the community within which both reside.
Field education therefore requires content and structure within the school's curriculum that facilitates the linkage between agency and community exigencies and the curriculum. In Reisch and Jarman-Rohde's (2000) seminal work on the centrality of field education for the new millennium, Robbins and Lager note, "Schools of social work [have to] rethink the community-academy relationship, develop field centered education, and re-assert the community based origins of the profession."
Foundation and advanced concentration field curricula need to be designed to meet community needs to service particular populations and address unique social problems, while at the same time ensuring the dissemination of broader professional knowledge, skill and mandates.
Areas of vital importance in the field curriculum focus on: a) Critical thinking and the development of skills for assessing individuals, families, groups, organizations and communities; and b) the development of practice skills encompassing the ability to identify and label the intent of a skill and its behavioral component.
Areas of vital importance in the delivery of the field curriculum focus on: c) assessing and enhancing an agency's ability to provide a professional curriculum; d) educating field instructors to the fundamental skills and processes of field education along with the theories that inform it; e) strengthening the educational function of faculty field advisement in assessing student progress and teaching the student to operationalize agency function and meet field curriculum requirements; f) highlighting the liaison function of faculty field advisement as the major representation of the school agency partnership for informing faculty of agencies' germane issues. g) Ultimately, field directors need to function as much more than a canary in the mine (Kolar et al, 1997) monitoring dangerous atmospheric levels.
Principle 2: Field instruction is the primary domain for informing curriculum and faculty of practice issues and needs, particularly practice effectiveness.
Field education must inform every curricular domain regardless of how each school's faculty choose to organize bodies of knowledge, be it conventional sequence areas or the domains defined by COCEI.
While the domains of models of social work practice, and research - science to service. should be readily identifiable links to the community and agency needs, these connections have been more tenuous due to the fewer number of recent Ph.D.s teaching practice who possess the depth of practice experience more generally evident in prior decades. Immersion in practice would in the past have propelled the development of meaningful practice research. Furthermore, the nature of the university's decreased rewards for clinical practice, along with pressures to produce scholarship too often based on a narrow "scientific paradigm" have resulted in more practice faculty relinquishing the field advisement role either to adjunct instructors or to non-tenure track clinical faculty. These occurrences have further decreased faculty chances of coming into direct contact with agency imperatives, which could enrich their research and teaching capabilities. At this time, much of what faculty learn about agency constraints they hear from what students share in the classroom, not from direct contact with agencies either as practitioners or as researchers. Field education as the lynchpin for social work education is poised to re-direct a more effective integration between the academy, research, and effective understanding of social work practice which applies high standards for practice, theory building and research.
The social policy curriculum grounded in the domains of science to service, ethical principles and decision making and knowledge of diversity gives students the opportunity to recognize how policy impacts directly on their clients and their communities. Readings can offer a broad theoretical perspective on social welfare policy. But discussions and written assignments are enlivened when focused not only on the impact of policies on students' clients, but on a deeper partnership between student, agency, policy classroom, and school. Integration would be enriched if student assignments were designed to provide something useful to the agency, such as a report, or document analyzing the impact of particular policies on clients. Coordination of this kind would require the policy sequence to design educational structures that facilitated more direct linkage to agency needs. Further involvement of field instruction departments would provide the necessary partnership for effective field learning.
The human behavior and the social environment domain gives students an opportunity to consider clients and themselves through the lens of various theories. Students write about clients through a perspective they would not always have the ability to view systematically within the ongoing pressures of agency practice. Here the case method which utilized field education material would serve to enhance learning and integrate field with classroom experiences. Some case method materials have great potential to infuse the agency with additional analyses of client and social environmental issues. This domain offers ample opportunity for learning about organizational and institutional behavior as well as that of small groups and the effective application of small group theory to enhance community and organizational participation.
The curricular domain of diversity when viewed along with human behavior theory and integrated with science to service paradigms, provides terrific opportunity for further involvement in affecting policy and informing intervention with individuals, families, groups, communities and organizations.
Viewing the conventional research curriculum through the lens of the science to service domain not only gives students opportunities to become learned and discerning about social work research, but fosters further chances for students to conduct group and individual projects within the realities and context of their own agency practice. Such projects require faculty and agencies to work in partnership with the field placement to design research projects that are educational for the students, and useful for the agency. When the school and a group of agencies are able to partner together in designing a research model which examines the effectiveness of social work practice models, practice competencies, and impact on clients, these efforts represent a deeper application of the inseparability paradigm.
Principle 3: Field education as the signature pedagogy for social work education is comprised of many complex cognitive, action, and affective processes which gradually effect the transformation of the student into a reflective practitioner.
It is primarily through the field experience that the curricular domain of self knowledge and self awareness is actualized for the student. These educational processes serve to do more than connect knowledge of theory to practice abilities. They provide a vehicle for dynamic and integrative development. For example, despite the many efforts of field instructors and teachers to bring knowledge to light, to help the student comprehend the role of the social worker, more often than not, upon their early encounters with client systems, the students fumble. They do not readily connect theory to practice: "What does my field instructor mean I have to engage, to tune in?" In the conceptual and reasoning domain, the student will wonder, "Why is it that you think that what the client says to me is different than what he is really saying?" The student will attempt to understand assessment: "Why do you say this family is not ready to be moved to permanent housing?" The student will reflect on policy: "Why are we unable to move this homeless family to a permanent situation?" The student will be forced to look at the domain of values and judgments: "I don't get why a mother would take drugs and risk the lives of her children? What does my field instructor mean I have to suspend judgment? Isn't good parenting a positive value?" The student might face boundary issues: "Why can't I just give the mother my phone number?" Fortunately, most students take the field instructor's direction on faith in these early stages.
After the first semester, the student will have begun to figure out the social work role but he or she will not be able to execute it (Reynolds, 1948). Now the student will experience the true frustrations of practice. Practicing the piano sounds cacophonic, but the good ear knows what the goal is. So too does the good student once comprehending the social work role. The student then attempts to fill in the gaps, and tries to enact the complexities of the roles and skills becoming someone who knows what to do but is not yet able to do it (Reynolds, 1948).
At the same time, a curriculum with field education as the signature pedagogy, which transforms students, can also transform faculty as they see changes in practice, and recognize opportunities to enrich their classes and research as they observe and are involved in their students' engagement in becoming professionals.
Principle 4: Field instruction serves to unite learning and service in the cementing of relationships that have positive outcomes for the academy, the agencies, and the students.
If we are to take seriously the nature of field education as the signature pedagogy for social work education, then all of the curricular areas would be organized so that the student would have a chance to not only analyze an agency situation in the classroom, but to learn within school and agency structures that were designed to facilitate the reinfusing of this content back to the agency and in turn back to the school. This link to the agency would be based on identified agency needs and a design that would facilitate the mutually invaluable infusion of knowledge between the school and the agency.
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