Field work and Field Teaching

It was logical that if a methodology of casework was beginning to emerge in the late 1940s and early 1950s, social work teachers and practitioners should try to discover how to help students to apply this theory in practice. This meant a sea change from learning how to function in the agency, picking up as much as possible about clients from the experience of individual staff members, and learning to fulfil administrative requirements. The new demand was that the student should both learn about the agency and also apply certain concepts about human behaviour in working with individual clients. On the basis of a systematic assessment, tested in the light of subsequent response, clients should be helped to meet or come to terms with their problems and make more effective use of available social resources. This skill in personal relations obviously demanded of students an insight into their own attitudes, moral values and cultural assumptions, feelings about particular kinds of people, and ability to accept expressions of hostility, dependence, grief and pain without denying their reality. It was believed that this training resulted in general and transferable skill and attitudes as well as the knowledge of a specific service. It obviously demanded supervisors who had absorbed and were practising the ‘new’ casework, had more to teach than their own individual experience, and were familiar enough with the content of the course teaching to help the students to see its application in living situations.