Field Placement Research Articles

Field Note—Responding to the #MeToo Era in Social Work: A Policy for Sexual Harassment in Field

ABSTRACT An alarming number of social work students indicate experiencing sexual harassment in their field placements; however, very few formally report these experiences. Recent public discussion about the prevalence of sexual harassment at work and the lack of trauma-informed responses have heightened the urgency to provide policy solutions that are effective at eliminating the behavior; social work students placed in field are no different. Field education offices should have a clear policy for how to respond to sexual harassment experienced in field placements. This article reviews the process undertaken by a school of social work to revise the field education policy to include a section of sexual harassment experienced in the field and offers recommendations and lessons learned for other programs.

Teaching Note—Termination of the Social Work Process: Field Education and COVID-19

ABSTRACT The termination process is integral to social work practice. Social work educators are charged with providing students with curriculum to build knowledge and skills to engage in a deliberate, task-oriented approach to concluding the social work process. However, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, social work students in field placement suffered an unprecedented level of unplanned premature termination experiences. This teaching note describes the experiences of undergraduate students who, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were obliged to prematurely terminate their field placements and client relationships. The author shares lessons learned from the experience, including content and assignment suggestions, along with recommendations for future research regarding termination of the social work process.

Preservice Teachers Taking Action: Enacting Teaching Practices and Pedagogical Theories in an After-School Literacy Club Field Experience

This article examines the teaching practices and pedagogical theories preservice teachers (PSTs) enacted in a newly designed after-school literacy club field placement. We draw from sociocultural and activity theories to analyze data collected in the qualitative study that examined the following research questions: (1) What teaching practices do PSTs enact in an after-school literacy club field placement? (2) What pedagogical theories guide their choices about which teaching practices they enact in the after-school literacy club field placement? and (3) In what ways does this field placement afford and constrain PSTs’ appropriation of these practices and theories? Findings consider three ways that the field experience afforded—and at times also constrained—the opportunities made available for PSTs to enact teaching practices and pedagogical theories related to their learning in coursework including learning from and with fellow PSTs, developing ownership over curriculum, and making connections to university coursework.

“I Didn’t Want to Be Ignorant”: An Exploration of Why Preservice Teachers Sometimes Choose Silence in Critical Conversations About Texts With Elementary Children

Discussions about texts can offer valuable opportunities for critical conversations about power and privilege. While we know such conversations are important to have in school, many teachers report feeling unprepared to facilitate them. In an effort to understand the in-the-moment decisions preservice teachers (PSTs) make in response to children’s contributions during critical conversations about texts, this qualitative, design-based study examines how PSTs responded to elementary-age children while facilitating discussions about texts in their field placements. Although various kinds of responses were made (e.g., eliciting children’s thinking, orienting children’s contributions to one another), in this analysis, we examine the moments where PSTs identified their silence as salient. Findings reveal that (1) some PSTs developing understanding of the role of talk and desire to efficiently accomplish the task did not seem to set them up to see critical conversations about texts as a space for sensemaking, and (2) other PSTs did see critical conversations about texts as spaces to engage in sensemaking but felt discomfort grappling with unanticipated issues that arose. We discuss implications for literacy researchers and teacher educators committed to supporting critical conversations with children in schools.

Navigating Emotion Work by Using Community Cultural Wealth: Student Teaching Experiences of Teacher Candidates of Color

ABSTRACT When teacher candidates learn to teach for equity and social justice during their practicum, they must learn to deal with the emotional conflict and tension that arise from fraught racial dynamics. Because limited research has focused on teacher candidates of Color during their practicum, little is known about how they agentively navigate conflicting emotions vis-à-vis the racial power dynamics at their field placement. Informed by critical race theory and its conceptualization of emotion work and capital, in this study, I examined what types of emotional tensions one Latinx and two African American teacher candidates experienced during their practicum. I drew on counter-narrative methodology and used written reflection, interview, and field note data for the analysis. The participants often drew on their community cultural wealth—the knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by communities of Color to survive and resist macroscale and microscale forms of oppression—to navigate conflicting and contradictory emotional norms that governed how participants ought to behave and feel at their field placement. In this article, I argue for explicit attention to the power-laden emotion work of teacher candidates of Color in their access to and embodiment of community cultural wealth during teacher education.

Surviving the Semester During COVID-19: Evolving Concerns, Innovations, and Recommendations

ABSTRACT The emergence of COVID-19 created significant disruption for MSW students across the United States. This study uses several data for a case study of MSW student attitudes about COVID-19, online instruction, virtual field placement, and innovations during the emergence of COVID-19 in the United States. Data includes qualitative data from weekly student survey responses (n = 75), observation notes from class participation, data from a policy analysis assignment, and COVID-19 online data gathered through a student class assignment. Findings address evolving concerns and roles of MSW students, challenges posed in virtual field placements, and student-identified innovations. I identify five lessons learned from this case study regarding group assignments, context, agency, mental health support, and equity.

Changes to MSW Faculty Workload Resulting From COVID-19: An Issue of Equity

ABSTRACT As a result of the health and safety concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, in Spring 2020 social work programs nationwide were required to make significant shifts in their instructional methods and field placements. These changes often resulted in faculty members taking on new or additional responsibilities related to teaching and field. This work explores the experiences of full time faculty members from the 18 accredited Masters of Social Work (MSW) programs in Texas. Sixty faculty members completed an online survey about changes to their teaching and field related responsibilities during COVID-19. Results indicate that non-tenure track faculty were most acutely impacted by these changes, leading to significant increases in both teaching and field responsibilities relative to their tenure track peers. Additionally, faculty working at private institutions reported less of an impact on their workload than those working at public institutions. These results underscore the importance of supporting non-tenure track faculty, who are often women and from racial/ethnic groups historically underrepresented in academia, who are afforded less job security and employment related benefits, as they continue to take on additional responsibilities essential to the continued operation of MSW programs. Implications for future research and social work education are discussed.

Maintaining Professional Standards in Early Childhood Teacher Preparation: Evaluating Adaptations to Fieldwork-Based Experiences During COVID-19.

At institutions striving to maintain face-to-face field placements and instruction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, circumstances changed daily in response to new developments at the university, local school districts, and personal circumstances. This mixed-methods study explored and evaluated the adaptations made to early childhood teacher preparation courses in an undergraduate program in order to provide relevant training through a variety of instructional modalities including face-to-face, virtual, hypothetical, and mixed reality. Focused on maintaining professional standards through adapted coursework designed to meet student learning outcomes, instructors reflected on multiple instructional modalities and analysis of demonstrable learning outcomes for students in a four-year bachelor’s degree program resulting in state teacher certification. Data were collected from students from three different cohorts (n = 26) through course assignments, reflections, and instructor- and self-assessments. Results highlight several areas where students found success in meeting professional standards in new ways including: knowledge of development, relevant and responsive curriculum, collaborative engagement, cultural and familial knowledge, inclusive and individualized design, and flexibility and adaptability. Students were prepared to teach in the following ways: designing curriculum, implementation, and reflective practice. Students felt unprepared to teach citing needing more practice and continued skills development. These findings highlight the need for flexibility in the face of the pandemic and underscore the importance of using the new knowledge and practices generated about student learning to reinvent early childhood teacher education programs when faced with post-pandemic realities.

Field Placement Termination During COVID 19: Lessons on Forced Termination, Parallel Process, and Shared Trauma

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has created a less-than-ideal environment for social work education and practice, especially for student interns trying their best to navigate the ups and downs of the forced termination process. Supporting students in meeting this challenge during an era marked by shifting routines, revised learning plans, altered work environments, and increased collective stress is a daunting task for social work supervisors, agencies, faculty, and university administrators. This article offers a literature review on the following concepts: forced termination, parallel process, and shared trauma. These concepts are then used as analytic tools for understanding the potential effects of COVID-19 on the experiences of student interns navigating the forced termination process. A student case example is presented and analyzed, as is the faculty liaison’s response. Insights and considerations for managing forced termination during the pandemic are offered.

COVID-19 and Social Work Field Education: A Descriptive Study of Students’ Experiences

ABSTRACT In March 2020, the federal government declared a national emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In accordance with public health guidelines, social work programs rapidly decided whether students could continue, modify, or suspend their field placements. The current study (N = 1,522) describes these events from the perspective of Bachelor of Social Work (n = 632) and Master of Social Work students (n = 890). Data were collected through a nationwide survey administered in March and early April 2020. The findings include students’ experiences with remote service delivery and abrupt terminations, and their insight into the role of social work in an unprecedented crisis. Implications for social work education include the need for contingency and continuity planning, and the importance of emotionally supporting students.

Field Note—Social Work Field Education in Quarantine: Administrative Lessons From the Field During a Worldwide Pandemic

ABSTRACT Social workers are trained to respond to national disasters but, during the emergence of the novel Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, their traditional face-to-face methods of responding to client needs were not accessible. Field placement educators were required to find alternative means for social work students to complete internships. This field note describes the response of a field education department, within a school of social work, to COVID-19. The school is housed within a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) located in a large metropolitan area. Lessons learned from challenges to field education created by COVID-19 are described. We conclude with recommendations for changes to social work curriculum and online social services and future research to tackle the aftermath of COVID-19.

International social work students in field education- considerations for supervision

ABSTRACT There is an increase of international students studying social work in Australia. Undertaking the compulsory field work component of social work studies can be particularly complex for international students, as they have to acquire an understanding of social work practice, knowledge and skills in a new cultural context. Prior research has highlighted the importance of supporting students and field educators to ensure successful quality learning experiences for international students in social work field education experiences. This paper reports on a subset of 35 international students who responded to a 2019 field education supervision survey in one Australian state, Queensland. The findings highlight that more international than domestic students are placed in placements with external supervision, that the overall the student cohort is younger than domestic students and that more international students reported longer supervision sessions. Despite field placements often being personally challenging international students rated their supervision experiences positively, and highlighted the opportunities it provided for support, learning and professional development. Students recognised that the process helped them understand concepts of critical reflection and an appreciation of the value of supervision and professional support for their ongoing professional development.

Teaching as Improvising: Preservice Music Teacher Field Experience With 21st-Century Skills Activities

The purpose of this study was to examine how preservice music teachers navigate 21st-century skills in their lesson planning and field experiences. Among the various skills, we focused on the Partnership for 21st Century learning and innovation skills. Over 8 weeks, 10 preservice music teachers designed lesson plans focused on creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration, and peer taught their lessons in an elementary music methods class as well as in their field placements. Our data sources included participants’ post-field teaching self-evaluations and post-project reflective essays, as well as instructor and supervisor field notes and face-to-face participant interviews. Through the data analysis, we identified three central concepts: (a) Curriculum-as-lived: Teaching like improvising, (b) Balanced in-betweenness: Structure and freedom, and (c) Collective efforts: Stepping away from comfort zones.

Opening Thirdspace: Cultivating critical geographies in art teacher education

Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relation to their larger teaching contexts and configure geographies that resonate with the lives of their students. Soja’s Thirdspace offers a lens through which teachers might explore place multi-dimensionally. Building upon a previous arts-based educational research study assessing the potential of arts-based inquiry for supporting pre-service teachers in exploring their teaching contexts, this study, through a second curricular iteration, focused explicitly on art pre-service teachers’ critical geographic analysis, in the form of Thirdspace. In mapping their school zones, pre-service teachers began to identify illusory impressions and conceptions of students, schools and communities and then began to deconstruct them. Such Thirdspace journeys offer space for pre-service teachers to hone their perceptions, to retrain their gazes to see their students’ physical and lived worlds in their complexity and plurality, and to re-imagine the relation between place and pedagogy.

Colonial rainfed farming strategies in an extremely arid insular environment: Niche construction on Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain

The island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands was first settled by people from northern Africa in the first millennium BC and then colonized by Spain in the late fifteenth century. This colonial legacy reflects an intensive land use driven by a European commodities market that experienced a series of boom-and-bust cycles. Although arid and seemingly resource limited, colonial farmers in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries copied water capture techniques from the Indigenous population, were strategic in terms of field placement, and engaged in a range of niche construction techniques. An analysis of 420 soil samples for their chemical properties (e.g., pH, electrical conductivity, nutrients) has revealed that sixteenth to nineteenth agricultural infrastructure in the form of open fields, terraces, water capture basins, and mulched fields was constructed on the landscape avoiding areas of high soil salinity and placement was tailored to variations in terrain slope, elevation, and rainfall. These improvements fundamentally changed ecosystem relations resulting in increased agricultural productivity. A series of eolian and volcanic events in the eighteenth century resulted in environmental changes requiring counteractive responses and new processes of niche reconfiguration. Large tracts of land were initially removed from production, but processes of niche construction created new opportunities. These included constructing mulched pits for cultivating sweet potato and tephra mulching for enhanced moisture conservation and accelerated growth of cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus) production on cactus host plants. Cochineal production lasted for a period of sixty years (ca. AD 1825–1885) before a collapse of the market caused by the invention of chemical substitutes.

Student Articulations of Critical Multicultural Education Concepts from One Study Abroad Experience in New Zealand

This study examines how six teacher candidates in one U.S. based teacher preparation program articulate understandings of critical multicultural education concepts after a field experience in a study abroad program in New Zealand. Teacher candidates were interviewed about their understandings of culture, privilege, and social inequality. Field placements were in high poverty elementary schools with high numbers of linguistic and ethnic minority students. Teacher candidate responses revealed development of cultural appreciation but a lack of engagement with issues related to privilege and social inequality. Teacher candidates further had difficulty articulating issues of power and systemic privilege enacted either in the New Zealand context, or in their home cultural context in the United States. This study calls for more explicit support for teacher candidates as they grapple with recognizing and practicing a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in order to realize the potential of diverse study abroad field experiences for teacher preparation.

The impact of specialised content courses on student teaching in a Norwegian teacher education programme

ABSTRACT In recent decades, most Nordic countries have seen reforms in their teacher education programme, giving rise to an ongoing debate on these programmes’ content, structure, and quality. As part of a recent reform of teacher education in Norway, new Master’s-level programme have been introduced to educate teachers for grades 5–10, whereby pre-service teachers (PSTs) take specialised content courses and undergo field placements twice a year. The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of the specialised content courses on student teaching. In this study, we used a survey design to collect quantitative data from PSTs and qualitative data from mentor teachers. PSTs teaching subjects they specialised in had a more positive teaching experience related to perceived learning outcomes in subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. The data from mentor teachers reinforce this finding; they reported that PSTs who taught subjects they specialised in showed faster learning progressions, were better at using different instructional strategies, and reflected more during guidance. The link between the specialised content courses and student teaching increases the coherence of the programme.

Innovative social work field placements in public libraries

ABSTRACT While the collaborative trend among professional social workers and librarians has accumulated much-deserved attention for several years, literature about social work students partnering with public libraries is only beginning to emerge. In fact, there are at least 100 branches that host social work students, yet academic literature examining the scope of these collaborations is sparse. Student placements do exist at Canadian and Australian libraries, yet the current research focuses on the bulk of known partnerships based in the United States. This paper includes information on the prevalence, nature, and fit of social work education and public library partnerships, garnered from an extensive review of the extant literature as well as public documents such as library memos and minutes, newsletters, annual reports, news articles, video clip websites, and social media posts. Practical applications of field placements are presented including students’ assignments for educational competencies such as conducting needs assessments, providing training to library staff, and developing outreach to patrons. Student attributes suitable for placement are discussed as are potential challenges in establishing and implementing fieldwork. Proposals for how to commence such partnerships are offered including suggestions for further research.

Mixed-Reality Simulation With Preservice Teacher Candidates: A Conceptual Replication

Given the critical importance of discrete instructional practices in special education, teacher candidates must be prepared to implement them upon entering the classroom. In preservice teacher education programs, field placements and clinical experiences rarely provide enough opportunities for preservice teachers to gain the proficiency needed to provide effective instruction. In this study, a randomized control research design was used to investigate the effects of a mixed-reality simulation experience compared with traditional classroom practice in the implementation of a system of least prompts. Results suggest that mixed-reality simulation with additional coaching supports significantly improved preservice teachers’ implementation of the prompting sequence. Social validity data collected offer insights into the use of mixed-reality simulation in practice with preservice teachers. Limitations and suggestions for future work are discussed.

Global health on the front lines: an innovative medical student elective combining education and service during the COVID-19 pandemic

BackgroundAn innovative medical student elective combined student-directed, faculty-supported online learning with COVID-19 response field placements. This study evaluated students’ experience in the course, the curriculum content and format, and its short-term impact on students’ knowledge and attitudes around COVID-19.MethodsStudents responded to discussion board prompts throughout the course and submitted pre−/post-course reflections. Pre−/post-course questionnaires assessed pandemic knowledge and attitudes using 4-point Likert scales. Authors collected aggregate data on enrollment, discussion posts, field placements, and scholarly work resulting from course activities. After the elective, authors conducted a focus group with a convenience sample of 6 participants. Institutional elective evaluation data was included in analysis. Authors analyzed questionnaire data with summary statistics and paired t-tests comparing knowledge and attitudes before and after the elective. Reflection pieces, discussion posts, and focus group data were analyzed using content analysis with a phenomenological approach.ResultsTwenty-seven students enrolled. Each student posted an average of 2.4 original discussion posts and 3.1 responses. Mean knowledge score increased from 43.8 to 60.8% (p < 0.001) between pre- and post-course questionnaires. Knowledge self-assessment also increased (2.4 vs. 3.5 on Likert scale, p < 0.0001), and students reported increased engagement in the pandemic response (2.7 vs. 3.6, p < 0.0001). Students reported increased fluency in discussing the pandemic and increased appreciation for the field of public health. There was no difference in students’ level of anxiety about the pandemic after course participation (3.0 vs. 3.1, p = 0.53). Twelve students (44.4%) completed the institutional evaluation. All rated the course “very good” or “excellent.” Students favorably reviewed the field placements, suggested readings, self-directed research, and learning from peers. They suggested more clearly defined expectations and improved balance between volunteer and educational hours.ConclusionsThe elective was well-received by students, achieved stated objectives, and garnered public attention. Course leadership should monitor students’ time commitment closely in service-learning settings to ensure appropriate balance of service and education. Student engagement in a disaster response is insufficient to address anxiety related to the disaster; future course iterations should include a focus on self-care during times of crisis. This educational innovation could serve as a model for medical schools globally.