"Reading the culture: international students' experience of professional learning during social work field placement
Creators: name: HICKS, Haidee
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 440901
subject: Clinical social work practice

description: As highly mobile educational migrants, international students traverse multiple geographical terrains in order to access higher education. Resulting levels of global migration have contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of international student enrolments in Australian universities over the past decade. Courses in professional disciplines, such as social work, have also reported significant growth in their international student cohort. Such programs, however, require extended periods of field placement or work-based learning that can present significant challenges to international students. There is evidence that social work programs in Australia have failed to respond to international students¿ professional learning needs during field placement and coherent pedagogical frameworks have not yet been developed to scaffold and enhance their distinctive learning practices. In response, this research has interrogated international students¿ experience of professional learning during social work field placement. Key analytical trajectories focus on the ways in which international students learn to navigate the agency context and negotiate professional learning spaces such as field placement supervision. This examination reveals international students¿ key professional learning practices during field placement and begins to differentiate the learning strategies that they have deployed during field placement. As an emergent, unanticipated, finding, this research will also analyse the ways in which participants learnt to navigate the racialised learning environment in field placement. <br><br>

The methodological framework in this research is informed by a constructivist grounded theory design and approach. Sixteen international students were recruited from Master of Social Work programs in Victoria, Australia and each student participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews at multiple points across their two social work field placements. The emerging theoretical concept illuminates international students¿ professional learning during social work field placement and comprises four distinct thematic categories: transnational professional learning, adaptive learning and learning to "create fit", navigating a racialised learning environment and negotiating the construct of field placement supervision. Key findings question the quality and efficacy of current models of professional learning in social work field placement that appear unable to capture the transnational professional knowledge that international students produce during social work field placement. Furthermore, the findings highlight the urgency for the development of more contemporary models of field education practice learning that are responsive to racially diverse student cohorts. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, the analysis will consider the implications for practice learning and pedagogy in social work field education in Australia. <br><br>

This original contribution to knowledge has highlighted the limited quality of current field education models for international students, who occupy a precarious, often vulnerable, position in social work programs. It is therefore imperative that social work programs and higher education institutions conceptualise and embed innovative models of professional learning that are responsive to international students¿ transnational professional learning. Emergent findings from this research, however, argue that international students signal the need for the social work profession in Australia to embed a more significant global orientation in its practice frameworks and epistemologies. Furthermore, it is incumbent on the social work profession to create pathways to facilitate international students¿ access to the broader profession, not only to increase its racial diversity and cultural heterogeneity, but as an important strategy to ensure a critically reflexive, transnationally orientated, profession.