Field education is an integral component of the Associate of Social Science in Social Work (ASocScSW) in a university in Hong Kong. With the increase of full-time students who have limited work and life experiences before enrolling in the programme, more social work educators and practitioners have raised their concerns about the learning of field practicum of these students. The dissertation reports on a qualitative study investigating the learning experiences of ten full-time Social Work students enrolled in the Associate of Social Science in Social Work (ASocScSW) programme who were undertaking their first fieldwork placements after the first year of their studies. The study adopted a phenomenological perspective and used a qualitative case study approach to investigate the experiences of these students through analysis of their written narratives and through the use of interviews. The findings of this study revealed that these students had, to a certain extent, developed the professional competence of a beginning social worker by reflection on their practice experiences in their placement agencies. Factors like placement agencies, field instructors, and assessment mechanisms all played important roles in these students' field work learning. The placement agencies served as the context for students' experiential learning; the field instructors acted as the facilitators for students' learning; while how the assessment mechanism of fieldwork performance worked all shaped these students' field work learning. This thesis provided useful knowledge regarding the learning experiences of these students in their first fieldwork placements. With a better understanding of the experiences of the students, the implications for improving the fieldwork education of social work associate degree programmes had been discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:573130 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Lim, Ye Bon |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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