Recently, Social Justice Solutions published a blog post on “the importance of social work internships” which mentioned attempts to influence the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) to reduce its field placement requirements in its MSW accreditation standards. A petition drive is currently being conducted to eliminate the internship requirement for all BSW and “non-clinical” MSW students, both in the future and retroactively. According to this petition, these students “should have the opportunity to customize their degree based on need, work experience, and desired career path whether this means taking more technology, business, clinical or political sciences courses in lieu of more internship credit hours”.
What this proposal ignores is that the field placement, on either a BSW or MSW level, is more than simply an accumulation of credit hours, but rather an essential process of socialization into a profession that can have profound impact—even life and death—on individuals, families and communities. For example, I think here of the social worker involved in child welfare work—a field of social work that might be characterized by some as “non-clinical”. The professional responsibilities—protecting a child from severe abuse or neglect or evaluating a specious allegation of abuse which might lead to a child being removed from his family—here are immense. Such work requires not only academic study of child development and child welfare policy, but active mentoring in an agency milieu where one develops professional judgment and an ethical perspective in line with social work values.
Even “macro social work” involves similar considerations as the lives and livelihood of community members may be at stake. Also, many “macro” social work positions involve management responsibilities involving oversight of direct practice social workers; without experience “in the trenches”, how can such social work managers effectively discharge such responsibilities?
While certainly some social work students who eschew field internships will “customize” their education in a way that insures professional excellence, many others will simply see this as a shortcut to a professional degree and licensure. For example, in many states, anyone with a CSWE-approved MSW degree can qualify for licensure that enables them to enter private practice of psychotherapy, regardless of whether their MSW education was “clinical” or “non-clinical”. It is not difficult to imagine that some potential students will view a “non-clinical” MSW education without a field placement as a route that will enable them to enter private practice in half the time. And, frankly, the field internship sometimes identifies students with significant character deficits that should preclude them from professional social work practice of any kind.
Given these apparent problems of making the field internship in social work education an elective choice, one wonders why the Network for Social Work Management (NSWM) has given significant exposure to this radical proposal in its website and emails.
Instead of giving BSW and MSW students the options to eschew a field internship, the Council on Social Work Education, as noted in a recent Clinical Social Work Association report, needs to tighten its standards for field placements, requiring students to be placed an actual agencies and institutions, to be supervised in-person by a qualified MSW supervisor, and for social work schools and departments to actually visit, in-person, all agencies not in their immediate communities before student placement.
Update – 4:35 EST:
The Network for Social Work Management is part of a Tweet Chat collaborative where we openly discuss many topics and hot button issues. The Network does not accept our partners’ policies or positions as our own but do agree, that together, we will openly discuss issues that impact macro social work practice. This is paramount for bringing a voice to an often forgotten about aspect of our profession. You have mischaracterized that we support eliminating field internships, we have no official position, but we will continue to support this forum where our partners can talk freely about issues everyone should be debating. We hope you will join future Tweet chats to bring your opinion to the table and in the future, call us to accurately state our positions. Thank you.
Written by:
F. Douglas Stephenson, LCSW, LMFT, BCD
Former President, The Florida Society for Clinical Social Work
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The Network for Social Work Management is part of a Tweet Chat collaborative where we openly discuss many topics and hot button issues. The Network does not accept our partners’ policies or positions as our own but do agree, that together, we will openly discuss issues that impact macro social work practice. This is paramount for bringing a voice to an often forgotten about aspect of our profession. You have mischaracterized that we support eliminating field internships, we have no official position, but we will continue to support this forum where our partners can talk freely about issues everyone should be debating. We hope you will join future Tweet chats to bring your opinion to the table and in the future, call us to accurately state our positions. Thank you.
Will add to the article.
Thank you, Matthew. I look forward to our future collaboration.
Thanks to several colleagues I have become aware of the initiative and petition to no longer require a field placement in social work, but rather to leave it up to the individual student who, under advisement, would make the decision that he or she thinks would be best about what is needed.
I write as the Director of Training for the Department of Social Work at Duke University Medical Center (where we have roughly 25 social work interns) and as a past recipient of “The Heart of Social Work Award” granted by the North American Field Educators and Directors, of the Council On Social Work Education.
While any forum that offers a platform for debate can claim neutrality on the issue at hand, the simple act of offering a platform confers respectability to the issue. What would be the response if I, for example, wished to start a petition to eliminate statistics or diversity from a social work education? What if I wanted to start a petition that would permit social workers to grant themselves Ph.D.’s based on work experience? Would the petition be taken seriously?
While there are some areas worthy of debate, there are others that are too outlandish for serious consideration. Working in the field as an intern must remain a part of a social workers experience. Internships should be neither painful or exploitative. If the student feels that he or she is being taken advantage of or that the internship is not worthwhile, then the school and the field, and the requirements of CSWE, must be held accountable. We must tighten standards, not reduce or eliminate them.
Many of us have had the experience of working under a manager who has never had to work in the trenches, or who simply doesn’t understand what it means to do quality clinical work. It is hard to believe that the experience so fundamental to what it is to being a social worker could be called into question. If the field practicum is eliminated, that person who skated by, might someday, God forbid, be your manager.
While one can always claim that various debates are useful, I sincerely hope that one side of this debate will be seen for how damaging such a prospect would be for those of us who aspire to hold ourselves and our profession to high respectable standards.
Sincerely,
William (Bill) Meyer, MSW
Associate Clinical Professor
Duke University Medical Center
Durham, NC
Professor Meyer, would you be agreeable if I was to re-publish this comment on our main site as a post? I think that you have hit on several important points that I would like to put out to our readers. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
I agree 100 percent with Drs. Stephenson and Meyers. I am a social worker psychoanalyst with considerable experience in the field. I saw my first patient in my medical field placement fifty years ago this October. There was intensive training and “hands on” training with process recording and in person supervision.
I’ve also had the good fortune to be “on the other end” of things teaching at the graduate and doctoral level, doing research in family, alcohol, policy, and casework/direct intervention. My social work PhD major in policy, along with certification as a psychoanalyst qualifies as the education available in the United States. To me, it is “elite.” It prepared me to do almost any kind of social work whether individual, group, community, or organizational. Not only that, the interpersonal skills and training transfer to every area of living and life.
I have the good fortune and actual experience to compare my traditional and excellent social work to a modern two year online and telephonic intensive professional training course for social workers and psychologists in professional coaching – with more than 20 courses. The students were all mature professionals, all of us with an MSW and PhD.
On a positive note, the conveniences are amazing. I could wear sweats or PJs to class. I could call in from the beach or vacation. My teachers could do the same. I could look at my mail or computer during class and pay partial attention. I saved gobs of money and time not having to travel to class or the university.
But I am sorry to have to report, the negatives are overwhelming.
The differences are overwhelming. I am intellectually learned and can pass almost any test in the field, and teach it. It is intellectual. The losses are dramatic. The integration of the intellectual with feelings (empathic and affective communication) is lost. It is gone. It is not teachable, nor can it be learned in this venue.
Sadly, it is as impersonal, narcissistic (selfish), expedient, opportunistic, and representative of the greed and economic and health failures in our wonderful country. For our profession to succumb and to open the way for the possibility that we shall throw away the essence of what we have to offer – unlike and different from psychology and psychiatry – is a bad mistake.
I rest my case.
Judy
Judith Logue, PhD
Princeton NJ, and Port St Lucie, Florida
I am a current MSW student, a part-time student, to be specific, which has allowed me to keep my full-time job while earning this degree. Even for folks like me, whose time is so limited that an on-line degree would seem appealing, should be against this trend to eliminate field placements. My coursework has been substantial, but nearly EVERYTHING that has prepared me for becoming a professional social worker has stemmed from my two field placements. I have learned critical skills during these placements, from simply observing the agency setting, and having the opportunity to jump right into the mix. The thought of eliminating these invaluable experiences is seriously short-changing students. Not all placements are ideal, I think most students would agree with this, but they allow you to “test” an area of social work, which in turn, helps you determine the areas in which you thrive, and those which you dislike. I’ll say it again, the field placement component to this degree is absolutely essential.
On behalf of Professor Holden:
We are writing to offer some evidence pertaining to the question at hand and that might inform the discussion. Our research team published the following paper in 2011:
Holden, G., Barker, K., Rosenberg, G. Kuppens, S. & Ferrell, L. W. (2011). The signature pedagogy of social work? An investigation of the evidence. Research on Social Work Practice, 21, 363-72.
The Abstract offers perhaps the best summary:
Objective: Many professions use some form of internship in professional education. Social work has utilized field instruction throughout much of its history. Recently, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) designated field instruction as social work’s signature pedagogy. A systematic review was undertaken to examine evidence related to this designation. Method: Twenty-five primary databases, three grey literature sources, a research university library (for monographs and collections) were searched in addition to a survey of the invisible colleges and hand searching of journals. The goal was to uncover quantitative studies of social work field instruction in the United States. Results: None of the studies that passed the initial review and were acquired for full examination met the inclusion criteria, precluding a meta-analytic integration. Conclusion: The assertion that field instruction is the signature pedagogy of social work would be more credible if supported by stronger evidence.
This is what is referred to as an ‘empty meta-analysis’. If you are interested in reading the full paper you can send me an email at: gary.holden@nyu.edu
Regarding the Holden’s meta-analysis, it should be noted that many “bright lines” in social work (and other fields) are not supported by empirical research. For example, why shouldn’t the MSW be one year….. or three? Or why shouldn’t advanced licensure require five years of post-MSW practice…. or six months? Or why shouldn’t medical school take 3 years? Or five years?
These issues are decided by a consensus of opinion in our professional community.
So just to be clear Joel – are you asserting that professional consensus is superior to rigorous research?
gary
Gary: Certainly rigorous research can address many important questions. However, I can only imagine the cost and practical problems in designing an impartial study that compared the “outcomes” of a MSW degree with a field internship with a MSW degree without an internship. To begin with, would students be randomly assigned to each condition? What would the outcome criteria be? And how would these criteria be decided? (By “professional consensus”?)
Imagine if there was a study to determine whether physicians could practice a specialty with only a two year residency instead of a four year residency? Or if an airplane pilot could fly commercially with only 500 hours flight experience instead of 2000 hours? Would you want to be the patient or passenger of the doctor or pilot with lesser experience as outcomes were systematically evaluated?
If we accept that informed consent is needed in such research, how could we ethically pursue the field internship question in “rigorous research”?
I am currently a MSW first year student at CSUF. I believe that having an internship as a graduate level student is IMPORTANT and should remain a requirement. Think about all of the practice skills you learn in your masters program versus the undergraduate information that just scratched the surface into what it means to provide individual and group therapy to clients. Regardless of experience, having an internship as a MSW is critical in one’s professional development. Sure, there are some great arguments against my opinion in this article, however we need to think of the future of our profession. There are plenty of individuals who are post-bac students from completely random undergrad programs. I have a B.A. in Sociology, which is a one-up from a few of my engineering or business cohort peers because I know the fundamental theories that are based around a lot of the practice skills that we use in our field of social work. Therefore I believe to make it fair and to make sure that our universities are helping shape PROFESSIONAL, PROFICIENT, and ETHICAL social workers, the field placement requirement needs to stay.
An internship in medicine under the supervision of experienced medical practitioners is never brought into question, nor are internships questioned in the educational training of PhD psychologists. How else can a medical doctor or a psychologist gain experience? By reading more textbooks? Actual experience in dealing with real life situations is considered essential. In business it’s called, “on-the-job training,” and so it is in both clinical social work and administrative social work, except we call it “field work.” The requirement for hands-on learning experiences, under the guiding hand of trained practitioners, is essential for the development of professional expertise.
Why is field work even being considered to be unnecessary? Without hands-on experience in “larger systems,” social workers with BSW and MSW degrees, fresh out of college, will not be adequately trained to deal with the financial and organizational problems that all social work agencies, both public and private, have to deal with. And then there is the very real risk of untrained social workers with BSW and MSW degrees being given clinical jobs for less pay than would be offered to a clinically experienced social worker.
Yes, the lives of our clients are at stake — and the Council on Social Work Education should be reminded about the field of social work’s primary concern for the quality of life, and not be over-influenced by any short-cuts to the professional education of social workers which will sacrifice that quality for unwarranted gains.
Robert Shorin, ACSW, BCD
Associate Psychoanalyst, American Institute for Psychoanalysis
Vice-President, Karen Horney Clinic
I would rather see a push to pay interns fairly for the labor we provide (in addition to more rigorously vetting placement sites) than to eliminate field placements altogether. I know many of us who feel exploited and disappointed in a field that purports to be so justice-oriented while maintaining as unethical a practice as unpaid internships.
As a current MSW student at University of Denver, I cannot imagine going into this field without the opportunity for field placement. When initially considering the journey my graduate education was going to take, I considered taking the macro route. However, I decided that just like any of my previous work experiences, it would be hard to direct people doing a job that I had never done myself. It would be even harder for me to take someone seriously that did not understand my job. Because of this, I chose to take the clinical route. I could not have been happier. I am leaving my education feeling prepared, knowledgable, and ready to hit the ground running. If I had merely had my educational experiences, and not those working in the field, I would know an incredible amount about theory, but would have no idea how to conduct myself as a professional.
One thing that I have experienced working with other disciplines of helping professionals, is that social workers are often regarded as “less than” something. Personally, I completely disagree with this. My education has been well rounded, multi-facetted, and complete. I have an understanding of how to conduct myself with other fields, a range of client systems, clients themselves, policy, and research. I often hear that because an MSW only takes a year or two that somehow, social workers are less prepared going into the field that counselors, psychologist, etc. I also disagree with this point. BUt even though I disagree with these statements, I can recognize that as a social worker, I will fight for every ounce of respect I receive. As a clinical social worker, I find it alarming that social workers were not involved in the DSM V process. If we want to continue becoming a respected, well rounded, and valuable group of professionals, we need to continue to hold ourselves to professional standards. That means keeping field placements in BSW and MSW programs.
LIke some other responses, I do believe that compensation would be an improvement. Many interns are never compensated for the work that they do at their internships- and let’s face it, an education in social work will hardly ever provide an immediate return on investment. We do good work, and we are well prepared for most anything that is thrown at us. Why are we not demanded that we be compensated for that degree of commitment to others? Why is it, that after accruing over $100,000 in student debt getting my degree, I should turn down an opportunity to do a job I love at my current internship, because they simply cannot pay me what I need to pay back my student debt? Why is it that with a Master’s degree, I have to consider getting paid less that $40,000, when I paid more than that for each year of school? Being humble and resisting entitlement does not mean that we take less than we deserve, it means that we don’t overestimate our worth.
I also agree with some comments that the process of vetting potential internship sites should be more strictly vetted by universities and the CSWE. I’ve met students that had such horrible experiences, mostly from supervisors that were not social workers, that they have left the profession. I also have met students that graduated with a master’s degree and never sat face to face with a client. This is simply unacceptable. If we want to produce quality professionals that adhere to our ethics, we should be providing them with excellent learning opportunities. We should be ensuring that they are getting what they are paying (and working for free) for.
In general, I would be supportive of stricter guidelines for graduating students with BSW and MSW degrees. When I sit in a graduate classroom and students ask what the NASW Code of Ethics is, I have to wonder how it is possible that in less that 8 weeks, they will be a colleague in this field. How is it that students graduate without being members of our National Association? And how is that most still think that social work just means making someone’s life better? While that is a core element, our value is that the person we are helping feel empowered to help themselves. This profession has succeeded because it has grown and evolved to compete with others and to be an asset to agencies everywhere. I am begging as someone who loves, supports, and is dedicated to my title as a social worker, please do not take a way the requirement for internships in degree programs. Work for stricter guidelines and vetting processes and more applicable internship options for each career path, but don’t throw in the towel and leave us vulnerable to more scrutiny.
In addition to the many good reasons that relate to providing and obtaining a quality social work education that have been included in this discussion, another important and practical reason for doing field work is that graduate students benefit from the relationships they begin and develop during their field placements. Those relationships typically contribute significantly to successfully obtaining employment. And, those relationships can be instrumental in supporting experienced professionals as they navigate changes throughout their careers.
As a social worker, field instructor, faculty member, and researcher I would like to weigh in on the significance of field instruction. I take Prof. Holden’s comments seriously, but I believe that one reason he had null findings is that there has been very little serious research on how field placements affect learning. However, there are studies from the field of education and other professions that does provide some support for the kind of experiential learning that takes place in field. I’d direct anyone who is interested in learning more to the robust data on the impact of community service learning.
I supervise about 7 students annual in macro field placements, including research internships, and can attest to the importance of having students learn to apply their knowledge in the field. I have had students who thought they knew more than they did and others who did not realize what they knew. A particular aspect of the field placement is the development of “soft skills” such as learning to manage time, participate constructively in meetings, work in a team, etc. that does not occur in a classroom setting.
Finally, i agree with the sentiment that we should do all we can to find ways to provide more stipended (aka paid) field placements. The few that we have in our program are in large organizations or health care settings that have the financial situation to pay interns. None of the grassroots or small non-profits have that kind of budget. I have at times gotten grants (from Kellogg, HUD, or Ameri-Corps) that did provide stipends for a handful of my field students. However, this is a big issue and should be a priority for fundraising by the programs and schools. I think effort in that direction would be more productive than calling for an end to field placements.
I feel that my internships have been extremely beneficial to the development of clinical skills (more than any of my classes) and have been a stepping stone to obtaining employment. I cannot really complain about any of my field placements, but I had a few friends who were placed in internships where they learned nothing and were merely observers or glorified assistants. What a waste of time that was for them. I am fortunate to have had positive internship placements.
I think what rubs me the wrong way about internships is that we are not compensated financially, as other professions would provide compensation at the masters or doctoral level (and this continues after graduation in our jobs). It is even a loss of money because I then I have to pay for the credits for the “internship”. A start would be for colleges to not charge for those credits. Even better would be for NASW to lobby for fair pay equal with other professions based on education and experience. Nurses with Bachelors degrees often make 15-20k more than we do with a Masters degree. Both a clinical jobs and in both you take on a great deal of risk.
Prof. Gutierrez, writes: “I take Prof. Holden’s comments seriously, but I believe that one reason he had null findings is that there has been very little serious research on how field placements affect learning. However, there are studies from the field of education and other professions that does provide some support for the kind of experiential learning that takes place in field. I’d direct anyone who is interested in learning more to the robust data on the impact of community service learning.”
Thank you. I am glad someone takes our findings seriously. Please send a reference for a credible systematic review of service learning if you have one and perhaps someone else could make an argument why that evidence would be transferable to field instruction in social work. I think it might be a tough logical chain to convincingly support.
Our paper was a response to CSWE’s assertion that field instruction is the signature pedagogy of social work. We note the following in that paper:
———————
“Shulman (2005) asserts that:
“signature pedagogies are important precisely because they are pervasive. They implicitly define what counts as knowledge in a field and how things become known. They define how knowledge is analyzed, criticized, accepted or discarded. They define the functions of expertise in a field, the locus of authority, and the privileges of rank and standing. (p. 54)”
It is not clear to us how an educational component can be the central aspect of a profession’s education, yet be equal to some peripheral aspect (the classroom) as the EPAS authors assert. Moreover, are the authors of the EPAS, in their embrace of the signature pedagogy concept, arguing that the definition of:
– knowledge creation processes
– functions of expertise
– the location of authority
– privileges of rank and standing
should be determined by field instructors? By agencies? As Jenkins and Sheafor noted long ago:
“social work education has been unable or unwilling to submit the field instruction process to disciplined evaluation and, therefore, it has not generated an adequate literature to become an appropriately creditable part of higher education. One result has been great variation in field instruction, with much of it embarrassingly low in quality. (1982, p. 3–4)””
——————————————–
Just as many have written responses asserting the importance of field instruction without rigorous supporting evidence in this current discussion, social workers have done so at least as far back as Edith Abbott in 1931.
In my view if an accreditation organization is going to propose that some form of experiential instruction is the MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE IN STUDENTS’ LEARNING, then they should at least have a few rigorous studies that demonstrate that the method actually produces desired outcomes.
In fact, harkening back to Prof. Joel Fischer’s groundbreaking 1973 study, one might even ask: Is field instruction producing more negative than positive outcomes? Good intentions don’t preclude iatrogenic effects.
Respectfully, gary
SOCIAL WORK: Are We Headed to Extinction?
by Mark Schusheim, LCSW
Miami, Florida
Since its inception, our profession has included a rigorously supervised internship as integral to the establishment of a beginning professional identity. It has always been seen as an absolutely necessary component of all MSW programs because it is the only way that new initiates into the profession can integrate didactic learning, theory, and method of practice with the closlely supervised experience of face to face contact with real life suffering humanity. The memory of the Field Placement with its ups and downs, its anxiety and exaltation…its acculturation process. That’s what we all share. That’s what makes us neophyte Social Workers. That’s where we develop our professional Identity. We may all go on to do other things in the field, but we’re all qualified to work directly with clients by virtue of the Fieldwork Placement.
This tradition has been adaptive until recent societal changes have brought it into question. Leaders in our field are searching for new, more adaptive approaches to training new members of our profession so as to enable them to compete for clients in the new world where there is no pathology, only individual uniqueness. In this internet age of instant gratification, tried and true methods may no longer produce the proper image that will appeal to today’s client.
Today’s client is a networker…a team player. Like all team members, they crave someone to encourage and mirror their uniqueness. They were all told as children that they were special with unique abilities. They need the kind of mirroring that can only come from…a Coach. Mental health and therapy and old fashioned casework are all so Twentieth Century. Never mind Psychology, Psychiatry, or Psychotherapy. Coaching is the catchword for today. That’s what today’s hip clients feel they need. Unfortunately, that’s not what we’ve been training our students to do. We have lost the market to Coaching.
The leaders of the profession are searching for ways to adapt to this new reality. The question is, how to design a program that will shape a new, more appealing professional identity…an identity unburdened by the dowdy psychological theories of the past or that air of intellectual ability that today’s Reality TV watching client finds such a turn off. A program to cheer them on…to turn them on,…to make them be the best they can be…to be winners…to keep swinging!
It is obvious that we old timers, trained as we were, have nothing to offer the Social Workers of tomorrow. A field placement with one of us as supervisor could only teach them the ancient verities that are now so seemingly out of date and unadaptive. Better they should be left to invent their own method of practice as the spirit moves them, free of the inhibiting forces of a supervisor who could only impede the student from inventing his/her own, more up to date, more original way of helping the internet generation.
It is only time before we change the doddering name of our antiquated profession to something more in keeping with today’s hipper ethos.
How about Social Coaching. Now that’s a catchy name!
I say end the Field Placement. It can only produce qualified Social Workers.
************************************************************
Mark Schusheim, MSW, LCSW
Miami, Florida
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I have worked in corrections, residential treatment, substance abuse/detox and mental health. I was CEO of a large out patient mental health clinic in St. Paul, MN and have been in management in those other domains. There is no question in my mind that the lack of an internship at any level of practice in any domain of social work poses a serious risk to the organization as well as to the service recipient and the social worker. The risks are to life, outcomes, organizational stability and malpractice liability. I would never consider an applicant for a job requiring social work competencies if the applicant did not have an appropriate internship.