Community college field placement internships: supervisors’ perspectives and recommendations

ABSTRACT

Community College human services students represent the future social service workforce. The defining feature of their training is 250 h supervised field placement internship. Despite burgeoning research describing best practices for supervision of Bachelors of social work (BSW) and Masters of social work (MSW), there is no research aimed at supervision for community college students, leaving a gap in our understanding of best practices for supporting community college students’ pedagogy and sustaining partnerships with agencies. This exploratory study offers recommendations for best practices supported by our discovery of the benefits, challenges, and strategies involved with offering community college student internships in New York City human services agencies. We analyzed data from semi-structured interviews with 30 field supervisors through qualitative content analysis. Community college students and agencies both benefit substantially from the field placement, however agencies identified significant social and structural challenges specific to working with community college students that require interventions for both field supervisors and students alike. Suggested interventions aimed at improving supervisor training, procedures for focusing goals of supervision sessions, assisting students in meeting their academic and social needs, as well as supporting supervisors’ professional goals to promote best practices are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Field supervisors
• field supervision
• community college
• human services
• best practices
• field practicum
• internship
• social work field practice
• social work internship
• human services internships

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Stella and Charles Guttman Community College for generously supporting this research through the Innovation Grant for Faculty Research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College [Innovation Grant].

Notes on contributors

Anya Y. Spector

Dr. Anya Y. Spector, PhD, LMSW is an Assistant Professor of Human Services at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College.

Krimili Infante

Ms. Krimili Infante is a graduate of the Human Services program at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College and is enrolled is a Bachelor of Social Work program at Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.