“Thrown to the lions” - a reflexive exercise with social work students on their early practice experiences

ABSTRACT

This article presents an exercise aimed at stimulating the students’ critical reflective thinking and reflexivity in a seminar course from a Social Work undergraduate program. The exercise, deployed through collaborative methods and focus groups, sought to foster the students’ inter-subjective recollection and sharing of their first contacts with professional practice. The integration in the institutional setting, the contact with newly-met routines of practice and the experiencing of complex situations and critical incidents were key dimensions subject of attention. The exercise was focused on three interrelated key dimensions: how students experienced the process of integration in the organization; how students conceptualized intervention problem(s); how students represented the (dis)continuities between academic knowledge and practice-based learnings. The exercise resulted in perceiving the most important challenges students faced in their internship conveyed on their own terms. It also allowed access to the students’ accounts of their first contacts with practice.

KEYWORDS:

• social work
• internship
• early practice
• reflexivity
• supervision

1. Introduction

In this article is presented an exercise meant to stimulate critical reflective thinking among BSW level social work students undergoing internship practice placement. The exercise, implemented between 2016 and 2018, was part of a seminar course of a Social Work undergraduate degree in a Portuguese public University. The exercise relied on the students’ inter-subjective recollection, sharing and collective discussion of their experiences of internship. The aim of the article is twofold: to describe and explain the methodological design of the above-mentioned exercise, its aims and operationalization; to analyze the results achieved by the exercise considering its main objectives.

The integration in the institutional setting, the contact with newly-met routines of practice and the experiencing of complex situations and critical incidents are key dimensions targeted by our approach. The exercise relies on a systematized sequence of collaborative group work sessions and focus groups as instruments to instill reflective thinking and reflexivity. A purpose that fits Zuchowski’s (2014, p. 7) assertion that ‘assisting students to develop critical reflection and reflexivity skills is central to social work education as these are core to social work effectiveness and identity’. The very same skills Leung et al. (2011) also consider to be a ‘core professional competence’ (p. 54) of Social Work.

The exercise is consistent with a critical learning scheme, not just for the students themselves, but also for faculty, considering that the reflexive insights stemming out of the students’ reflections can improve the critical tools needed by the instructors to assess and enhance the organizational aspects of the internship programme and supervision issues alike. The exercise focused on how students experienced the process of integration in the organization; how students conceptualized intervention problem(s); how students represented the (dis)continuities between academic knowledge and practice-based learnings.

The exercise can be identified with a developing trend in Social Work and in other fields (Davys & Beddoe, 2009; Fook & Gardner, 2007; Hafford-Letchfield & Engelbrecht, 2018; McSweeney & Williams, 2018; Paris & Gespass, 2001; White, 1997), consistent with de-centering the learning process and supervision from the tutelary figure of the educator and academic supervisor, and re-centering it in the student/supervisee.

Reflexive exercises, often associated with phenomenological approaches (Longhofer & Floersch, 2012), have had ample use in the context of individual and group supervision (Davys & Beddoe, 2009; Graham, 2017; Rankine, 2017) and service users’ advocacy (Houston, 2015). However, there is lack of evidence regarding their integration as devices to support learning processes for students undergoing early practice training.

A brief contextualization and conceptual clarification of reflective processes and reflexivity will be presented in the next section, especially focusing on how they can correlate with and may be supportive of learning processes, particularly in the case of early practice training outside the academy. Afterward, the methodological design of the exercise will be presented, followed by the main results, a discussion and concluding remarks.

2. From reflective thinking to reflexivity and learning

The exercise was part of an internship Seminar course held during the final academic semester in which internship practice occurs. As such, it is thought to be, mainly, a learning device and an opportunity to create a reflective learning space and culture (Béres et al., 2019) in-between academia and the practice work places. A learning device for students, as they are invited to share their experiences and, collectively with peers and instructors, collect feedback on their action and acquire guidance for future initiative in their internships. As such, it was conceived as an interactional group work process deemed to ‘improve student learning skills’ (Calvo-Sastre, 2020, p. 2). It can also be taken for an assessment device for faculty, who can use the experiences and critical reflections shared by students for the improvement of supervision and internship practice placement.

In social work education, group learning has been extensively used (Calvo-Sastre, 2020; Warkentin, 2017) as a means to facilitate cooperative apprenticeship, to help students improve communication and team work capabilities, to foster mutual trust (necessary to better make students cope with tense moments), and promote ‘the development of a reflective practice through dialogue and exchange’ (Corradini et al., 2020, p. 17).

Critical reflection and reflexivity, although related, are not interchangeable concepts. D’Cruz et al. (2007, p. 83) drew a particularly clear distinction between critical reflection and reflexivity, being the former connected to the recalling of critical incidents in the past and used as a ‘learning opportunity for the future’, while the latter stands for a critical form of knowledge production more reliant on a closer time proximity with the subject’s experience. This dual conception of reflectivity is based on Schon’s (1983) distinction between reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action. Such distinction was evidenced during the exercise’s implementation, considering that students referred to some critical episodes as already resolved situations, while other episodes were mentioned as current troubling critical incidents instilling the students’ apprehension, doubt and anxiety. Though distinct, both concepts indicate the subjects’ ability to critically reflect on their actions and, based on that, to report and explain past decisions and to point out future options and ways of acting in the world (Caetano, 2015). Individual narratives depicting critical incidents can be taken, Béres et al. (2019) suggest, as raw material to conduct reflection, produce reflective learnings, and, in the process, achieve transformational outcomes.

This reflexive path allows reaching more than just descriptive information on the individual’s past and current experience, as it allows reflective and self-reflective accounts about critical biographic and professional incidents to surface. As such, remembering and narrating may turn into a learning process, being this learning transformational as students develop new perspectives on the situations and endeavors faced in their earliest practice (Williamson et al., 2010). As Davys and Beddoe (2009, p. 923) note, ‘it is not sufficient to have an experience to learn’, and, if we mean to turn that experience into a learning device, critical reflection is needed. Besides, it becomes transformational because reflexivity informs future action, ultimately providing subjects clues to change patterns of action (Archer, 2003).

The critical reflexive process and the power it has to uphold transformational purposes does not pertain only to the subjects themselves. As Williamson et al. (2010) point out, capturing the students’ critical reflections on their field practice experience can be useful to assess internship programmes and supervision procedures. In light of this, the reflection produced by students can offer valid inputs (Rawles, 2016), should we say learnings, useful also for academic staff to introduce changes in practice placement planning and in the curricular restructuring of the degrees. Besides, such reflexivity adds substantive pedagogical value to the students’ pre-professional experience considering the possibilities offered by the processes of dialogic and intersubjective sharing (D’Cruz et al., 2007; Leung et al., 2011). Although we have not followed the footsteps of more formally planned experiential learning models, like Kolb (2005), we see the collective reflexive exercise as ‘a space for learning through conversation’, continuing and complementing the role of the internship institution as a ‘space for acting and reflecting’ (Calvo-Sastre, 2020, p. 8).

Our approach proposes that the critical reflection and reflexivity about early internship practice occurs when the students take as object of reflection the strange and unusual situations they faced (deemed as such by the students themselves). This perspective seeks to encourage students to reflect on critical incidents in the field of practice, as D’Cruz et al. (2007) recommended, but also on the diverse sorts of events and behaviors they could identify (or sense) as strange in face of pre-acquired assumptions about what constitutes the expected ordinariness of the work environment.

This perspective considers that, for students about to be initiated in the profession, the internship corresponds to the first regular experience of intersubjective construction of professional common-sense, as Caria and Pereira (2017) noted. Converging with these authors, we take the internship as something more than just learning how to practice, considering that it is also a process in which the students’ learnings are constructed contextually alongside professional and academic supervisors, generating a shared sense of professional know-how.

The first weeks of the internship programme are about ensuring the students’ integration in the local organization. In essence, students are challenged to grasp what resonates as ordinary, obvious and customary in the routine of social work practice. Only insofar as this intersubjective professional common-sense is acquired and developed by the internee, the student will be able to identify with (as being part of) a common social livelihood and implicitly acquire the professional knowledge that is present herein.

During the first weeks, students consolidate their initial practical learning—an effort that cannot be separated from the process of integration in the agencies and services (Williamson et al., 2010). The approach taken in our exercise challenged students to identify, reflect and collectively discuss that process, from the earliest moments in the field to the subsequent stages of integration. Students were asked to recount their experiences and reflect over it, recognizing which could be taken as key factors behind their perceived success as well as the issues involving their academic and field practice supervision. Students were also invited to recall the expectations they held before practicum started, dimensions that have drawn considerable attention in social work research (Miehls et al., 2013; Moorhouse et al., 2014).

The exercise conforms to what can be called a situated reflexive practice (Malthouse et al., 2014) supported by a methodology based on a bottom-up collaborative and participative approach. An approach that presents reflexivity as the subjective product of the lived experience of students (Caria & Pereira, 2017).

The exercise sought to assist students in developing critical reflection, expecting that such critical reflection would allow internees to generate new frames of understanding (Fook & Lishman, 2007) around the complexity of the interactions (including power relations) taking place in the professional settings to which they were new to. In this sense, critical reflection and reflexivity invites students ‘researching their own practice and developing their own practice theory directly from their own experience’ (Fook & Lishman, 2007, p. 368).

3. The reflexive exercise

3.1. Exercise outline and academic context

In the school where this exercise was held, internship training is concentrated in the seventh and final semester of the BSW degree, starting in September and lasting until February (21 weeks approximately), involving an average number of 50 students placed in State, municipal or third sector organizations (i.e. the voluntary sector, non-governmental organizations, nonprofit organizations), under the supervision of an academic and of a local institutional supervisor. The exercise took place from 2016 until 2018, each year, in university venues as part of the activities of the seminar course Social Work Intervention and Research (from now on, Internship Seminar). That seminar course is intended to keep track of the students’ internship evolution.

From the second to the third years, students have first contact with practice settings and practitioners through observation tasks, workshops and class presentations. Full immersion in practice only happens in the seventh and final semester. The seminar is meant to prepare students for their intensive practice internship, to assist them devising the practice plan, and also to support them throughout the whole internship as well as providing students with orientations for the preparation of their final internship report. Considering that the Internship Seminar was meant to follow the students’ progress while away in their institutional placement, new strategies were sought to keep track of the students’ evolution throughout this intensive practice experience. These new strategies sought, firstly, to create an interactive and collaborative dynamic that could let students share, discuss and reflect their break-troughs, as well as the obstacles and qualms they encountered.

The procedure herewith presented is the result of that challenge. In order to break from static non-dialogic teaching and large group discussion it was thought, from the start, to lay the strategy on collaborative dynamics and participatory methods, working with alternating groups not larger than 12 elements. The idea was to combine small group discussions interleaved with collective sharing of ideas and critical reflection. Therefore, students were challenged to retrieve and explore, in the classroom, the experiences, interactions and intersubjective encounters they faced in practicum. From the narratives of their experiences, we sought to stimulate reflexive processes (Béres et al., 2019), assuming (Davys & Beddoe, 2009), p. 920) idea ‘that the main vehicle for learning is reflection’. The exercise closes in on the phenomenological perspective, as reflective thinking (Graham, 2017) efforts were made to leave aside value judgments and/or theoretical-conceptual considerations, trying, as much as possible, to suspend a priori assumptions (an effort essential to allow the students’ reflections to be built around their own experiences). Two or three instructors conducted the exercise (depending mostly on the number of focus groups to be held in the second session – Figure 1). The instructors were all part of the social work teaching staff, knowing the students since the first year.

Figure 1. The reflexive exercise – layout and activities.

The exercise was developed in two seminar sessions (Figure 1) around four key axes: (i) the process of integration in the practice setting; (ii) the interactions with the professional staff and earlier contacts with service users; (iii) issues regarding supervision; and (iv) the issues related to theory/practice, identification of and reflection on critical situations. The first session occurred, approximately, between the 4th and 5th weeks of internship and the second session took place near the end of the internship. According to each session’s specific aims, different methods were used to prompt the dynamics of collective discussion as well as gathering data on the students’ perceptions and representations. The first session relied heavily on collaborative processes with very little intervention from the instructor and the second session relied on focus groups facilitated by up to three instructors.

3.2. The first session

The first session comprehended four rounds of collaborative discussions. Each round addressed a specific theme: round one challenged students sharing issues related with their integration in the organization; round two was about how students perceived the territories’, the services’ and the users’ issues and how they ended up constructing their intervention problems; round three dealt with the relationship students established with service users; round four revolved around the issues related with the theory-practice nexus.

In all four rounds, the students were divided into smaller groups. In rounds one and four, the groups gathered students placed in organizations providing distinct services (which we called intersectoral rounds) and in rounds two and three each group gathered students practicing in related areas of service provision (sectoral rounds). During the exercise, efforts were made to ensure that each group’s composition was not the same between rounds. This rotation allowed developing reflections between students placed in different organizational settings and pertaining to diverse sectors of services delivery. The dynamics of the exercise demanded that each group appointed a spokesperson, who communicated the main viewpoints and conclusions discussed in meticulously controlled periods. The spokesperson registered on paper cards (delivered to them in the beginning of the round) the main ideas that came out of the discussion. At the end of each round, the cards were returned and the contents shared and discussed with the rest of the groups. The cards were kept by the teaching staff for later in-depth content analysis.

At the beginning, the topics related to each round and time limit were disclosed. The contents of the sessions and rounds were not revealed before the seminar took place. The first session could last from two and half to three hours and the second one (focus groups) could take up to three hours.

To give a more detailed description of the first session and the dynamics of its collaborative discussion rounds, the first one focused on the integration in the organization. Students were asked to disclose key episodes and moments that marked their earliest contacts with the institutional setting. Related to this, students were invited to recall certain situations they saw relevant regarding their integration process, particularly moments that could configure ruptures with pre-established ideas and would have contributed to change their attitudes and the course of integration. The exercise sought to evidence narratives (Hall & White, 2005; Nygren & Blom, 2001) conforming to what reflexive sociology theorists have been mentioning as life ruptures or biographic crises (Caetano, 2015; Lahire, 2008). For this round, as well as for the other three, the debates lasted 20 minutes and the groups were given 15 minutes to present their conclusions to the audience.

Round two drew around problem perception and construction. Here, students were invited to identify the ‘problems’ that drove the social intervention in the services they were placed in and to explore how those ‘problems’ were perceived and constructed as such. This step was also thought to stimulate the students’ critical awareness of how assessment and decision making (Taylor & White, 2001) were processed in the institutions.

Round three was about users’ participation in the intervention processes and in the assessment of services. Firstly, students were invited to identify the cases where and the situations when such participation happened. Afterward, they were asked to address how that participation was concretized. Adding this theme to the exercise was meant to stimulate their critical awareness of the importance of user participation and community involvement in social services’ provision and assessment (Matthies et al., 2011; Tonkens et al., 2013; Trevithick, 2012).

Round four took students to reflect on the theory-practice nexus, exploring how they perceived and dealt with the discontinuities between the knowledge acquired in the academic lecture room and the one emerging out of the field of practice (Lee & Fortune, 2013).

3.3. The second session

The second session of the exercise involved focus groups. These were aimed at stimulating critical reflections around issues like the supervision process and at recapturing key episodes in the students’ relation with their supervisors.

In the beginning, the focus groups’ purposes and guidelines were explained. Each focus group consisted of a maximum of 12 students, seeking as much as possible a heterogenous representation in terms of internship intervention sectors and type of host institution. In each year, an average of four focus groups per cohort were conducted, taking approximately 90 minutes each. Considering that the seminar course may have one to three instructors, a maximum of three focus groups could take place simultaneously.

As mentioned above, this second session implied organizing focus groups around two distinct, yet intertwined, issues: institutional supervision and academic supervision. Intended to explore how students perceived and experienced the institutional supervision process, the focus group on institutional supervision revolved around the following topics of discussion: what expectations students had about practice supervision prior to starting their internships and how they imagined their internship experiences would be like; how those expectations were built; what sources of information contributed to build their initial beliefs. The second focus group round attempted to confront the students’ earlier expectations on supervision and how the experiences felt as the internship unfolded. The focus group guide followed a main overlapping topic: how were the earlier expectations met by the actual internship experience. In addition, the discussion was complemented by the introduction of a complementary topic on how institutional supervision was being perceived and its contribution to the students’ advancement.

Students were provided with an informed consent explaining the goals of the exercise and the possible use of the data collected during the sessions, ensuring that participation was voluntary, anonymous and that the exercise was not subject of grade evaluation in the Seminar course. After reading the information, internees were invited to sign the informed consent. Students were asked to be careful about exposing data that could threat the preservation of anonymity, particularly in the case of service users. The database was stored by the three instructors involved in steering the seminar and its analysis was done exclusively by them without disclosing raw empirical materials to third-party elements. The same informed consent served for both sessions. Since the focus groups were not recorded on camera, students were informed by the instructors that the sound recording was to take place in order to allow the transcription of the discussions and that no public diffusion of sound was to happen. After transcription, the audio recordings were erased. Transcription was done by the first author. She, along with the second and the third authors, conducted content analysis, while the fourth author participated in the conduction of focus-groups and assessing the preparation of the focus groups guides (not being involved in the analysis).

Around the limitations and constraints of the exercise, a few issues should be pointed out. Regarding operational issues, in the first round of the first session (Figure 1), arguably as the result of the students’ surprise with the tasks they were asked to do, almost every group took a considerable time to start talking and sharing. The role of the instructors was key in facilitating the initial interaction. In some groups, five to 10 minutes of the 20 minutes reserved for this initial stage were often constrained by personal inhibition, apprehension and a sense of wondering about the purposefulness of the exercise. Initial shyness and inexperience in engaging in collaborative discussions and participatory processes hindered the students’ participation, nevertheless, as the first accounts by the more talkative ones arose, so the others joined, including the sharing of emotional narratives about stressful situations. Often, students cried, exposing considerable levels of psychological stress and situations of oppression (from the practice-related responsibilities they felt hanging on their shoulders). In those cases, within the groups, attitudes of mutual relief were common.

From the second round onwards, as students got into the dynamics of the exercise, the initial shyness faded, with students often complaining about the scarce time available for each round. The dimension of groups in the first round was also a limiting factor, particularly when there were more than 9 students per cohort. The size of the groups and the time available (20 minutes) limited the possibilities of sharing longer narratives and collectively and reflexively discuss them.

Notwithstanding the recognition, by the students, of the usefulness of the exercise to (i) let them perceive how reflexive critical thinking actually can happen (considering that reflexivity and critical reflection were often understood as buzzwords heard and read throughout their social work educational trajectory), (ii) to improve their reflexive capabilities, and (iii) to help some of them overcome particular obstacles in their internship practice, they revealed doubts about how to fit that reflective experience into their final internship report (although that document demanded students to be critically reflective, descriptive exhibition of practices and task performance assessment ended up constituting the main frames internees used to report their practice experience).

Despite these limitations the exercise produced reflective processes whose outcomes are to be unfolded next. The analysis was drawn from materials selected from all sessions (2016–2018), namely cards registering opinions from rounds 1–4 and focus groups transcripts. A total of 152 students participated in the three years when the exercise was carried out (averaging 50 students per year). The data was subject to categorial content analysis (Schreier & Flick, 2014) considering six main coding categories (mentioned in the next section). This method was favored over narrative analysis (Frank et al., 2012; Riessman & Quinney, 2005), considering that the data collected did not involve long and dense accounts. Instead, the information tended to synthesize the discussions held in the different rounds of session one and in the focus groups. The topics used to steer the collaborative discussion sessions and the focus groups constituted the departing point of the coding process. The 10 topics used in the exercise were conflated, generating six main categories: (i) the process of integration in the institutional settings, particularly regarding the experience during the first weeks; (ii) the familiarization with practice routines, emphasizing the emotional and relational aspects; (iii) the factors that facilitated and/or constrained the integration in the institutional context; (iv) the (dis)continuities between academic and practice placement apprenticeship; (v) the processes of identification; (vi) the definition of intervention problems.

The methodological approach followed in this study was eminently qualitative. The data gathered from the different rounds in session one was retrieved from the cards written by the students during their group discussions. Although it does not follow a strict criterion of representativeness—nor could it be so, since not all students participate equally in the discussions –, the quality of the information, the reliability and the trustworthiness of the findings, beyond reflecting a concern for respecting the participants’ speech, benefited from cross-comparison and triangulation. As part of the analytical process, these were key to infer major commonalities and divergences in the students’ discourses. Despite the fact that the interpretive nature of the analysis and the specificities involving these students’ cohorts diminish the transferability of results, the methods adopted to operate the exercise might be adapted to other contexts.

4. Unfolding the results

As regards the process of integration in the institutional settings, anxiety and apprehension were a common feature of the students’ first days of internship. It is noteworthy that students mentioned feeling more anxiety in situations when they had to deal with interpersonal contacts and social interaction, rather than when having to apply technical procedures. For some students, this came somewhat as a surprise as they recalled their earliest contact with social work skills and methods in the class room (in the first year’s practice courses). Back then, fears about whether or not they would be capable of putting into practice some operative procedures (like professional interviews with users) marked their initial contact with social work education. However, in the internship, once confronted with the reality of practice, those qualms about technical proficiency were eclipsed by the anxiety around the students’ initial interactions with professionals and users:

I remember in the first classes instructors starting to teach us about stuff we needed to do as … like professionals … like interviewing people, like doing social diagnostics and all those things social workers do. Back then I thought to myself ‘Will I be able to do it? The instructors make it look like it’s a such a huge responsibility!’. I felt anxious and insecure about starting practice. When the internship started it looks like all those fears vanished and I was so anxious about my ability to engage with the supervisor that I forgot about the technical stuff. […] In reality, doing interviews, writing reports and other stuff ended up being a piece of cake, but whenever I had to meet the supervisor or other practitioners and users, that’s what gave me the chills!

(focus group, 2018).

When called, on the focus groups sessions, to discuss their first impressions on integrating the internship institution, feelings of anxiety pervaded the students’ statements:

I was kind of afraid because I feared not being able to meet her [supervisor] expectations (focus group, 2018).

I was nervous, but that feeling went away in the earliest hours, as she [supervisor] introduced me to the staff, gradually making me feel at ease. In the first week I was feeling at home and whatever I did, she allowed me to do it by myself, under her supervision. Before starting any activity, she hands me documents to study and, then, I act as I see fit; in some cases, she corrects me afterward (focus group, 2018).

As students become integrated in the organization and familiarize with practice routines, they noted a need for extra encouragement from their supervisors. Besides the issues around their relationship with the supervisors, anxiety and discomfort were largely driven by a few structural factors: the students’ geographical proximity to the institutional setting; the sectoral imprint of the services and how knowledgeable the trainees were about the intervention problems; the students’ previous knowledge of the organization and its services (including access to manuals of procedure and the organization’s user’s information database). It should be said that some host institutions allow students full access to service users’ information while others do not. This circumstance generated perceived inequities among the students.

The exercise pointed out the importance of the emotional and relational dimensions (Cabiati, 2017; Corradini et al., 2020; Kolb & Kolb, 2005). The establishing of empathic relations between students and their institutional supervisors (and the rest of the staff) was pivotal for reaching a good integration in the first weeks. Such relational factors were crucial for strengthening trust between internee and institutional supervisor. The two following excerpts uncover how important were the emotional and relational dimensions in the internship insertion and adjustment processes:

She [supervisor] made herself available from the first moment, making sure she would be there to help me overcome the difficulties, as she called my attention to the challenging and demanding tasks ahead: there would be lots of work awaiting, not always easy to deal with. From the start, I had the impression that I was facing more than a professional … she was human, very human and that made me feel less worried

(focus group, 2016).

The factors that pose more constraints to the students’ integration are the ones related to organizational procedures, particularly the ways agencies deal with the students and involve them in the organization’s livelihood. As examples of such, students pointed out difficulties in clarifying the tasks attributed to the internees and scarce (sometimes inexistent) integration in multidisciplinary teams. Students also mentioned facing additional difficulties dealing with close-knit hierarchical structures and, in some cases, being affected by bad work environments. Critically reflecting on the institutional intervention frames, students noticed the existence of activities that, according to their judgment, were not concordant with the service’s aims. These activities were often perceived by the students as inconsistent with social work professional practice, among which were what they considered to be assistance-focused or cleaning tasks. It is noteworthy, here, the reflexive nature of such judgments: they evidence the students’ ability to critically appraise certain institutional practices in light of well-established social work values and principles, suggesting that such critiques may have impact on their current and future practice experiences. A few trainees pointed out the lack of concern on the part of their supervisors when it came to fostering a larger involvement in social work practice situations. Some were also disappointed for not being challenged to reflect and assess practice-related problems as social workers. Again, reflexivity takes place, when students think their identity as social workers. Here, the students’ identification with professional roles become subject of reflection, a reflection that takes students to consider the beliefs and expectations they held prior to the internship experience:

I knew that I could give my opinion and that was a good one considering the problem—we studied it in the classroom [issues about freedom of children in institutional care to dress as they liked and use make-up] – but the supervisor kept saying that I was not a professional and that I was there to learn and keep my eyes on them [professional staff]

(focus group, 2017).

Of course, our supervisor explained and justified the decisions she made, […] but it wouldn’t go beyond that. We were eager to participate more, and that was the problem. Besides, we wanted to have a greater involvement in [social] work duties

(focus group, 2017).

Sensed discontinuities between academic knowledge and the orientations for practice loomed in the students’ interventions. Along with the constraints arising from the organizational ambience and from the supervision process, the exercise allowed perceiving the sensed discontinuities between academic knowledge and the orientations for practice at the level of the internship organizations. Such discontinuities gained visibility when more tensional moments occurred, increasing the students’ discomfort, anxiety and sense of disbelief. The early confrontation and dissonances between theory in books and knowledge in practice was manifested by some of the students as moments of crisis difficult to deal with:

Theory should be taught more in accordance with practice (collaborative discussions, 4^th round, 2016).

It isn’t just theory lacking applicability to practice, often practice doesn’t apply to theory (collaborative discussions, 4^th round, 2016).

We became more nervous because […] we had a very good academic education. We’ve learned so much and we were kind of afraid to put it into practice. But then, when we got to do it, we see that it’s more simple. We deal with people and that’s what makes it more difficult than theory (focus group, 2018).

Students often approached the relation between theory and practice in ambivalent terms, with uncertainty and feelings of astray:

It was kind of hard noticing that there really wasn’t a connection between theory and practice

(collaborative discussions, 4^th round, 2017).

Theory teaches us to find solutions, but, so far, we haven’t seen that happening (collaborative discussions, 4^th round, 2017).

In reality, we faced situations where theory and practice just wouldn’t fit. […] That was awkward. We found ourselves kind of lost (collaborative discussions, 4^th round, 2017).

All the stuff we saw on the books about empowerment and those things about emancipation … I just can’t see that happening there [institutional placement]. The work done there is pretty much assistance and handing food baskets (focus group, 2017).

The internship presented students with opportunities to experience estrangement and the exercise tried to bring to the surface expressions of how students felt it. The discontinuities between academic and practice knowledge acquire great relevance here, especially when ethical stands are, in the students’ own perception, infringed. These divergences were predominantly revealed when internees faced sparse involvement of users in social intervention processes and in cases when users’ confidentiality was infringed.

The internees tend to identify themselves as insecure proto-professionals. That was perceivable in their narratives, as they evidenced the need to feel protected in and by the presence of the supervisor. Frequently, students claimed that they felt lost, especially in the earliest stages of practice, as if they were being ‘thrown to the lions’ (focus group, 2018). It tended to happen mostly in the cases of supervisors who, more preconsciously, asked students to carry out procedures and run errands autonomously.

As a result of the complex and diverse factors interfering in the internees’ socio-professional relation in the practice settings, the time needed to feel integrated varied. In the collaborative sessions some students mentioned having reached a satisfactory integration during the first week while the majority pointed out two weeks, others admitted that it took them one month or even more. According to the students’ accounts, we were able to identify six key indicators of a good integration: (i) the level of knowledge acquired about the institution and the social work activities developed there alongside the level of bonding with the supervisor and other professionals; (ii) earning the trust of the supervisor and obtaining considerable degrees of autonomy; (iii) accomplishing active participation in all processes of intervention; (iv) acceptance by service users; (v) developing a more informal relations with supervisors; (vi) having free access to institutional information and service files.

Issues regarding identifying intervention problems and acquiring a better-informed knowledge of the service users’ needs, histories and idiosyncrasies were not expressed as crucial for a better integration in the institutional setting. Identifying the key intervention problem tended to be done, predominantly, around the perception students had of the users’ needs and exposure to risks without taking into account socio-cultural specificities. Abstract qualities of vulnerability and dependence were ascribed to the recipients of social work intervention, Also, students tended to individualize the nature of social and intervention problems, keeping structural frames and socio-political analysis at bay.

A considerable number of students echoed the idea that users had difficulties complying with the statutory conditions set by the services. By doing so, students (re)produced a discourse that tended to hold service users responsible for their circumstances, blaming them for state subsidy dependence: ‘users who abuse what’s being offered’ (collaborative discussions, 2018); ‘subsidy dependents’ (collaborative discussions,). However, the sessions also showed that some students were able to develop critical appraisals about the structural conditions on which the disposal of social services was based:

Deficient inter-institutional articulation, lack of human, social and economic resources, de-professionalization (collaborative discussion, 2017);

Lack of time to do relational social work, lack of previous work from front line institutions and absence of local community resources to develop alternative responses (collaborative discussions, 2018).

Delineating the intervention problems and making social diagnosis was, according to the students, done through methodologies involving, at least, one of the following procedures:

information shared by the supervisor or other local practitioners; participant observation of institutional routines and informal conversations with users and practitioners; consultation of users’ individual files and contacts with family members and users; attendance of interdisciplinary meetings; users’ interviews and home visits; municipal social reports

(collaborative discussions, 2^nd round, 2016, 2017, 2018).

In conclusion, the collaborative sessions showed that the intervention tended to be framed without resourcing to theoretical or research-related backgrounds. The problems service users faced were, throughout the whole exercise, presented as taken for granted, without the support of any theoretical and conceptual device.

5. Discussing the results

Regarding the integration in the internship institution, students shared diverse experiences, uncovering the factors that inhibited or facilitated their adjustment to the institutional setting. The students’ discourses, lining up with what has been shown in other studies (Miehls et al., 2013; Moorhouse et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2014), give prominence to feelings of anxiety and apprehension, namely when it came to meeting and dealing with their institutional supervisors. The situations mentioned by the students showed that, as they become integrated in the organization and familiarize with practice routines, they need extra encouragement from their supervisors. This is consistent with Davys and Beddoe’s (2009), p. 922) observation that students, as they gain experience, the ‘need for structure becomes less but the need for encouragement and normalizing of feelings’ increases. Here, becomes evident the pertinence of the reflexive exercise as an instrument to unravel such feelings and understand the evolution of the internship experience.

The exercise also showed how the integration process could be mediated by relational factors, a circumstance highlighted by Butler et al. (2010), Cabiati (2017) and by Beddoe et al. (2000, p. 41), for whom ‘the supervisory relationship is at the heart of fieldwork education’. Besides the role of supervisors and the inherent relational factors, the exercise showed that group learning strategies might have an important part in attenuating or even resolving anxiety and uncertainty issues (Calvo-Sastre, 2020).

While reporting factors that constrained their integration, some students mentioned a certain lack of interest from their supervisors in having them more involved in work situations. An identical scenario was found in Miehls et al. (2013, p. 128) study. These authors convened the idea that, for internship students, establishing ‘clear expectations of supervision, mutual goal setting of the supervision, […] and the ability to use the supervisor as a mentor were all factors that contributed to successful supervision’. The relationship between student and supervisor is, in fact, a key component of the supervisory process (Cleak et al., 2022; Kaiser et al., 2004; Lefevre, 2005; McSweeney & Williams, 2018; Moorhouse et al., 2014; Pack, 2009) and one of the cornerstones of the students’ perceptions about the (potential) problems of the internship.

The gap theory/practice in internship practice was noted by Miehls et al. (2013, p. 144), who found that the internees ‘wish supervision was grounded in theory and then integrated with practice “in the real world”’. The same wishful thinking could be moted on our students’ discourses. Regarding the theory-practice nexus and the ways students understood and dealt with it, Lee and Fortune (2013, p. 656) noted that ‘students who integrated theory and practice more, reported more participatory activity and greater satisfaction with the field’. The capacity to establish connections between theory and practice might have improved from the reflexive thinking done within group discussions, as Corradini et al. (2020) found in their group work experiences with social work internees. However, in the course of our exercise, it was not possible to confirm exactly that the students who saw theory and practice in a more integrated manner, revealed greater satisfaction with their practicum. That was hard to infer, partly because the students did not relate to nor represented the theory/practice gap in common terms: caught in the middle of tensions and cleavages between practices and theorizations, students framed and reframed their self in-between contradictory, often overlapping intersubjective representations of their identity (as internees who were about to cross the frontier that divided the academic and the work worlds, with the inherent ambivalences and uncertainties).

The above-mentioned ambivalences and qualms may prompt feelings of insecurity which end up casting the students’ identity: as insecure proto-professionals, persons transiting to another life stage, a liminal stage in their passage from student to professional (Turner, 1991). Professional insecurity and personal discomfort in the internship context grew when the students reported a more distanced relationship with their institutional supervisor or when the supervisor tended to be more demanding and challenging. The critical reflections generated throughout the exercise allowed perceiving that the expectations held before practice had started concurred to create a sense of conundrum and to magnify the shock felt during the first weeks of practice. This fact shows how complex and difficult it was for students to assimilate and manage the multiple uncertainties, ambiguities and ruptures between their previous expectations and the actual experiences of internship practice.

The dissonances between university learnings and institutional practices manifested throughout the exercise (alongside with the particularities of the intervention and process of integration in the organization) constituted the axes through which the more challenging experiences became expressed. These very same challenges required students to appeal to their supervisors’ support. It is precisely along these axes that the reflexive exercise should focus, in order to produce a more profound incorporation of professional apprenticeship and competence out of the experiences and challenges faced during the internship process.

6. Concluding remarks

During the curricular stage, internship training is fundamental for consolidating the students’ knowledge-base and competences. Such consolidation can be facilitated by having students engaging in group reflection and collaborative discussions. Academic supervisors can have a maieutic role in fulfilling that purpose by encouraging and facilitating students to develop narratives about the situations they encountered in their practice settings. Students can be called to share their experiences and be asked to assume a critically reflective stand, hence reaching levels of reflexivity that may allow them to produce and sediment theory (out of their own practice training experience).

The reflexive exercise we have presented here on the experiences and reflexivity of students regarding their early internship practices allowed realizing the most important challenges students face in their internship, as stated on their own terms, particularly regarding integrating the host organization, handling the practice/theory gap, defining their intervention problem as well as problematizing intervention processes. More than devising the critical dimensions and stages present throughout the internship, the exercise allowed access to narratives on how that first approach to practice was experienced. It also offered students a resource that could be used to bolster their own capacity to think critically.

The students’ critical reflections pointed out issues regarding how the internship program was being organized as well as inequities between the host institutions’ approach to students’ reception and supervision. By holding diverse experiences in different institutional settings, the same cohort of students ended up manifesting different degrees of professional integration and identification.

Inspired by multiple theoretical, conceptual and methodological contributions on reflection and reflexivity as central components of education in social work, the exercise has some specificities regarding its organization and dynamics (alternating small groups discussions, collective inter-group discussion and focus groups), focusing on the interface between the academic environment and the institutional contexts of pre-professional practice. Besides, although acknowledging that the exercise corresponds to a non-mainstream experiment, we argue that, in order to magnify its reflective potential and outcomes, a better and wider integration of the exercise in our school’s social work educational programme would be beneficial.

These specificities of the exercise rendered clearer how pertinent it is to anticipate, multiply and diversify students’ contacts with potential future professional contexts, avoiding limiting those experiences to the final stage of the graduation programme. In this way it will be possible to generate a stream of experiences drawn from direct contact with social intervention, which, in turn, can feed reflection and reflexivity in social work education.

Acknowledgments

We thank our social work students who, from 2016 until 2018, took part in the Internship Seminar course, sharing in such an eager and open way their experiences in the reflective exercise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Portuguese national funds, through the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the project UIDB/04011/2020 (CETRAD- UTAD), and the project UIDB/04038/2020 (CRIA-IUL).

Notes on contributors

Vera Mendonça

Vera Mendonça: Graduated in Social Work from UTAD in 2002. PhD in Social Psychology and Anthropology from the University of Salamanca in 2014. She is an Assistant Professor in the bachelor's degree and master's degree in Social Work at the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro. He has organized several events and participated in national and international congresses. Its main research interests are: health and social work; spirituality in social work; ethnographic method and social intervention; gender equality.

Pedro Gabriel Silva

Pedro Gabriel Silva: Assistant Professor at the Uni. of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (Portugal) and researcher in the Centre for Transdisciplinary Development Studies. Holds a BA in Anthropology from ISCTE-Univ. Institute of Lisbon, a DEA and PhD in Contemporary Studies (Univ. of Santiago de Compostela). Was visiting student researcher at UC-Berkeley and invited researcher at the Univ. of Roskilde (Denmark). Is currently enrolled in a co-tutelle Social Work PhD at ISCTE-IUL/University of Jyvaskyla (Finland).

Octávio Sacramento

Octávio Sacramento holds a PhD in Anthropology (ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon), is assistant professor at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD, Vila Real), researcher at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Development Studies (CETRAD-UTAD), and research-collaborator at the Centre for Research in Anthropologia (CRIA). The knowledges and practices of social workers, especially in migratory contexts, are one of his research interests.

Telmo Caria

Telmo Caria holds a PhD in Sociology and is full profesor at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD, Vila Real). Also is researcher at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Development Studies (CETRAD-UTAD) and research-collaborator at the Centre for Research in Anthropologie (CRIA). The ethnographies of knowledges and practices of social workers, especially in third sector organizations, are one of his research interests.