Keeping the Boss Happy: The Social Organization of Social Work Field Education

Background and Purpose:

Heralded as the ‘signature pedagogy’ of social work, research suggests that neoliberal restructuring of the nonprofit and academic sectors has undermined field education (FE). Widespread downsizing among nonprofit organizations has reduced the sector’s resources for FE. Concurrently, market-oriented changes within the academy have given rise to increased student enrollment in social work programs without sufficient FE supports. Although the literature identifies how the nonprofit and academic sectors cope with these pressures by developing mutually beneficial relationships, there is limited research on the implications of these relationships for students. The experiences of racialized students, who are underrepresented in social work, are particularly neglected. This paper examines the work in FE coordination to explicate how race organizes this process for racialized students enrolled in a graduate social work program in the Greater Toronto Area.

Methods:

Using an Institutional Ethnographic approach, this paper draws from in-depth interviews as well as analyses of institutional texts such as forms, policies, and agreements. Interviews were conducted with five racialized social work students as well as two FE coordinators, one from both the nonprofit and academic sectors. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling, where recruitment materials were circulated through the researcher’s contacts. Participants were interviewed about the work that they completed and the texts that they encountered in FE coordination. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and were analyzed to uncover the work completed by participants. Analysis involved tracing work accounts from interviews through texts.

Results:

The analysis revealed that FE coordination produces racialized hierarchies through discursively complex practices that also make race invisible. For racialized students, this was accomplished through the following:

1. Collaboration discourse provided students with an illusion of choice through extensive FE coordination procedures;
2. Employment discourse devalued racialized FE settings by burying a race-stratified labour market throughout FE coordination;
3. Social justice discourse prioritized matching racialized students to devalued settings by organizing FE around the needs of marginalized communities; and
4. Competence discourse rendered racialized students incompetent for generalist settings and competent for racialized settings by atomizing practice into discrete qualifications related to language, skills, and experience.

The analysis also revealed that FE coordinators’ work also produced racialized hierarchies that were ultimately rendered invisible:

1. Mutual benefits discourse facilitated relationships between academic and nonprofit sectors such that the former provides the latter with students that meet labour needs; and
2. Fairness discourse concealed inequities in FE coordination through legalistic definitions of justice

Conclusions and Implications:

Through the relationships between the nonprofit and academic sectors, a race-stratified labour market has come to infiltrate FE to coordinate racialized students to devalued settings. This infiltration is legitimized through work practices that stem from the discourses of collaboration, employment social justice, competence, mutual benefits, and fairness. Effective FE coordination is not about learning; rather, this paper found that FE coordination is about supplying the nonprofit sector with students that meet labour needs, thereby ensuring the academic sector with an ongoing supply of FE opportunities. This paper implicates FE in reproducing a race-stratified labour market.