Abstract
The study reported in this paper focuses on social work students’ experiences of ethical challenges, including dilemmas, during their field placements. Moreover, drawing on dialogical approach and the results of the thematic analysis, the authors discuss what ethical dilemmas the students experience during their in-field practice, and what implications the handling of these ethical dilemmas can have for the organization of social work education. The findings that are reported in this article are the results of the analysis of six sets of data collected with the help of interviews. The interpretive framework used in this study is a dialogical approach. The research strategy has been a qualitative approach, and the data collection has taken place in semi-natural settings. The thematic analysis of the data lead to four major themes of ethical challenges that the students experienced in their field placements. The first theme concerns structural conditions on a macro level that the students were confronted with when in practice. The second theme is about ethical challenges due to the students´ lack of knowledge and experience in the field. The third theme presents challenges in direct work with service users related to the students´ awareness of values and perspectives. The fourth theme concerns ethical challenges that occurred when students interacted with others in the organizations where the field placements took place. We argue that due to the fact that the authorial agency of any learner consists of personal attitudes, goals, values, knowledge, competences, and skills, it is important to organize supervision activities in a way that allows discussions in free and fearless environments so that the student could learn and unlearn knowledge and skills. This means that in-field placements should be viewed as learning arenas for various types of knowledge and skills, including knowledge on themselves, and not just places where the students can gain only strictly professional practical knowledge and try out their theoretical knowledge.
Highlights
We define field placements as the “signature pedagogy” of social work and a part of field education in social work, where the intent of field education is to integrate the theoretical and conceptual contribution of the classroom with the practical world of the practice setting (CSWE, 2015, p. 12)
As the result of our thematic analysis, we found that the students experienced four major themes of ethical challenges in their field placements
We will introduce the ethical dilemmas that we discovered within the ethical challenges in the chapter of discussion
Summary
We define field placements as the “signature pedagogy” of social work and a part of field education in social work, where the intent of field education is to integrate the theoretical and conceptual contribution of the classroom with the practical world of the practice setting (CSWE, 2015, p. 12). The traditional way of following up the students during field placements has been through a one-to-one relationship between a social work student and a social worker at the organization where the field placement takes place. The oneto-one relationship has been claimed to have a great impact on how satisfied the students seem to be with their learning process during the placement (Bogo, 2008). Through field placements students are supposed to become more aware of their personal values through exercising social work directly with service users. It is important that the students get supervision in this process to reflect upon professional and ethical issues It is important that the students get supervision in this process to reflect upon professional and ethical issues (University of Stavanger, 2013, p. 6)
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