TAKING UP A SOCIAL WORK IDENTITY: PREPARING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS FOR ENTRY-LEVEL GENERALIST PRACTICE

Abstract

Undergraduate students who are new to the social work profession enter into a complex socialization experience. New to the profession, they are expected to absorb a variety of knowledge and skills learned in separate courses and then integrate these together into an authentic performance as a social worker. Additionally, students are trained to confront personal bias and must learn to socially locate themselves and begin to form their own critical framework for understanding and responding to the influence of oppressive discourses on everyday systems, structures, practices, and experiences. Although the socialization process is essential to the development of a social work identity, there is little description in the social work education literature about students’ experiences of that process. Through using a practice demonstration video as teaching-learning resource for an undergraduate child welfare practice course, this paper presents our effort to examine how students position themselves in relation to practices and skills shown in the social worker-service-user interactions on the video. For the purposes of this pilot study, we used qualitative content analysis to generate a descriptive analysis of students’ written responses to viewing the video interactions. Analyses of these responses revealed that, although students were able to name and discuss the practices they observed through the video demonstration, they were also challenged by the interactions that demonstrated conflict, client resistance, and the overt use of power in the worker-service-user relationship. The results demonstrate the need for greater understanding of how students become socialized into the profession and develop their own unique identities as social workers.