Responding to the Injustice Within Social Work Field Education
Engage: The UGA School of Social Work Magazine of Transformative Action • By Elisabeth Colquitt and Christopher Strickland • Fall 2023
“Field education was named the signature pedagogy of Social Work education in 2008 (Wayne et al., 2010). Before then, field education was the norm in social work programs as early as 1974 (Roberson and Adedoyin, 2019). The benefits of field education are obvious. Field education provides students with a unique experience, where they have the opportunity to practice the skills they are learning in the classroom in the field itself. Additionally, this component of social work education provides students with hands-on experience in the field of social work before they have even graduated. However, there is much to criticize about this component of social work education as it is currently implemented and the social injustices the current systems sustain.
Perhaps the biggest concern of field education as of late has been the lack of payment provided to social work students for their work in the field (Harmon, 2021; Students for Labor Practices, 2022; Metz and Fox, 2022). For example, UGA MSW students devote up to 20 hours a week and 912 hours over the course of their MSW program at UGA to work at their field placement with no pay. Student organizers at UGA conducted a survey in the spring of 2021 examining the hardships of field education among social work students at UGA using closed and open-ended questions that asked about field experiences, the impacts of field education on one’s paid employment, and the impacts of field education on one’s finances.”
