Abstract

Academic social work has an obligation to educate students in matters of social and economic justice. Effective social justice education requires two complementary components – conceptual knowledge in the form of well-designed coursework, and direct experience in the form of supervised field education in an appropriate setting. The latter component, challenging to provide, is generally the more commonly neglected. The paper describes field experiences offered to social work students by the Family Network Partnership (FNP), a community based youth and family service agency operated by the School of Social Work in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA. Students are immersed in a community context of poverty, high rates of crime, family disruption and poor housing stock, minimal public services such as transportation, and a general paucity of resources. The student learning process itself is conceptualized as a three stage “pedagogy of engagement” adapted from Kolb’s (1984) framework of experiential learning – (1) revelation and dissonance, (2) integration and linkage, (3) consciousness and commitment. The outcome of the learning process is, ideally, a professional identity as “social work citizen,” i.e. a professional whose work bears an inherent and irreducible reference to social and economic justice concerns in the “public world” (Fisher and Karger, 1997).