Social work field education permanently changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s the argument made by four Pacific Northwest educators in the spring 2021 issue of Field Educator: Practice Digest. One of those authors is Julie Kates, Associate Professor of Practice and Field Program Director for the School of Social Work at Portland State University.
“When the pandemic hit,” Kates said, “The crisis for field directors was that students couldn’t go to agencies. How are they going to learn and be engaged?”
This question led to reevaluating social work field education, to use unprecedented practices and a wider range of methods to deliver the course of study. Kates and her co-authors found their programs returned to the core values of social work: social justice and community responsive practice.
By collaborating with regional and state partners in public health and human services, social work field educators were able to respond to the needs of marginalized individuals, families, and communities by pairing interns with programs that were evolving their practices daily. This meant that when the world changed due to COVID-19, field educators needed to help their students find comfort with flexibility and the unknown.
“I looked at this (and I think many of my colleagues did too), as an opportunity to reset the purpose and expectations of field education,” said Kates, “To apply skills and knowledge from the classroom to a direct practice setting, regardless of the population or field of practice.”
It was a delicate balance. But at spring orientations in 2020, Kates found she talked differently to students about their expectations. She told them, “You’re coming into social work at a time where there is incredible need for a different way of responding to community. Social work looks different.” Though students may expect to come in and train to be a case manager, for example, they’d sometimes find that wasn’t what agencies were focusing on. So just like the agencies, the students had to pivot and be flexible.
Kates and her team demonstrated their flexibility and responsiveness by creating as many remote internships as possible, thus allowing their students to engage with an agency and field instructor in real time. “We really had to think about what kind of conversations to have with our field partners about what was reasonable for them,” Kates said, “We didn’t know whether they would be willing to engage students that way because everybody was overwhelmed.”
The field team held a series of roundtable focus groups to explore what their field instructors were open to. Kates found that an overwhelming number were willing and able to adapt and be flexible with how they engaged with their intern and provided training and supervision.
The transition also revealed a benefit of remote work. In social work education, students learn about and practice on the micro, mezzo and macro levels. Historically, many field placements typically emphasized “micro” direct practice placements, not fully attending to the spheres that impact organizational systems and communities. Engaging remotely allowed students access to the full range of practice, including mezzo and macro opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
Kates recalled an example where a healthcare social worker shared that the interns’ remote participation at administrative level meetings led to her community-based help center’s leadership seeing social work’s value. Agency leadership solicited a proposal from the sole social worker to hire more social workers for the organization. “It was because the students were there that this happened,” Kates said, “It actually blew me away.”
Students were also able to engage partner organizations in their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices in ways they couldn’t before. The Field Educator: Practice Digest article notes how COVID-19 provided a moment for social work students to truly see the depth of structural racism, particularly anti-Black racism in the United States. As a community-responsive practice, social work’s mission and values can help shape programs and interventions that mitigate and aim to eliminate these inequities. But Kates noticed that before the pandemic, students often weren’t participating in organizational DEI work. Remote work changed that.
“Many of our students in the BSW and MSW programs at PSU come to our school because they are passionate about equity and social justice,” said Kates, “So for many of them, I don’t think it was new that this was real. I think part of what was happening was that the rest of the non-social work world was finally acknowledging it’s real.”
“Students were able to bring their personal experiences and lens, coupled with what they were learning in school, to be responsive to this real disparity that has historically — and continues to — impacted communities of color, particularly Black and other marginalized communities.”
Kates and her co-authors redesigned field education to include alternative teachings, learnings, and agency-supported fully remote practice, returning their programs to the historic values of social work, while also deepening their engagement with community partners and students. For the future, they recommend focusing on how effective these strategies of increased resiliency and innovation were in response to an emergency. Hopefully this prepares the social work community for a range of crises that may emerge.