BJSW Advance Access originally published online on October 11, 2006
British Journal of Social Work 2007 37(1):91-105; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcl320
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An Unfinished Reflexive Journey: Social Work Students’ Reflection on their Placement Experiences
Ching Man Lam, Ph.D is the Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has been formerly the Director of Field Instruction and now is the Director of the Master of Social Science in Social Work Programme. Her research interests are related to clinical practice, social work education, new immigrant families, adolescence and family studies and she has published articles in these areas. The three authors share an interest in exploring knowledge and practice in social work field practicum.
Hung Wong, Ph.D is an assistant professor and director of field instruction at the Department of Social Work, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include poverty, social security and labour issues. He also published research reports on marginal workers, street-sleepers and Community Economic Development Projects.
Terry Tse Fong Leung, Ph.D is an instructor and fieldwork coordinator in the Department of Social Work, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include accountability and user involvement in the management of social work service and fieldwork education in social work. She published articles on these research areas.
Correspondence to Ching Man Lam, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong. E-mail: chingmanlam{at}cuhk.edu.hk
The fieldwork placement is recognized as one of the major components of social work education and a major determinant of its quality. A key aspect of the learning process in the fieldwork placement is the exposition of practice encounters to the students’ critical reflection. Given the importance of the process of ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective learning’, a qualitative study based on the reflective logs of social work students was conducted to explore the meaning of social work field education and the learning experiences of social work students during their placement. The study findings revealed that disturbing events experienced by students in their fieldwork were a catalyst to their reflective process. Meanwhile, their undue concern with knowledge and skills application within a circumscribed knowledge frame suggests the dominant influence of scientism and competence-based practice in social work, in which learning outcomes and instrumental and technical reasoning are highly emphasized. Discovery of ‘self’ was also the major premise in the students’ reflection logs, in which a majority of them took their prevailing self-identity as a constant state to be verified in interaction with others in the fieldwork placement. Reflexivity is manifested in asking fundamental questions about assumptions generated by formal and practice theories; it addresses the multiple interrelations between power and knowledge, and acknowledges the inclusion of self in the process of knowledge creation in social work practice. Its realization in social work education requires the social work educators’ reflexive examination of the dynamics that influence the construction of curriculum, which in turn construct our prospective social workers.
Keywords: social work placement, reflection, reflexivity
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