Enhancing Practicum Teaching and Learning in Social Work and Counselling Education:A pilot project to elicit, archive, and disseminate practice-based learning among students and fieldwork supervisors

Abstract

An impending new development in organizing and administering practicum training for both social work and counselling students is under way. A task force is created to rationalize a somewhat uncoordinated practice of organizing practicum training for four programmes involving six courses per academic year. This entails streamlining the work process of eliciting good practice, and attracting potential practicum sites in the short run, and developing a long-term training and collecting evidences for practice-based learning of our students while producing practice-relevant knowledge to feedback to the practicum sites. In so doing, it is also an important contribution of the university to the professional communities. The proposed project, if approved, will assume a central place in this long-term endeavour. The center-piece of this pilot project is a knowledge-transfer website created to function as an online (virtual) "practice library" that allows students and practitioners for SS4293 and SS6806 to access knowledge-producing practice accounts authored by our students in the context of practicum training, and to advance knowledge and practice by offering "critics" (England, 1986) to these practice accounts. The website also features a variety of "library facilities" that collectively enhances knowledge production, knowledge development, and knowledge transfer for advancing real-world practice of social work and counselling.