Social Work Students’ Reflections on Self-care While Completing Field Education During the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Self-care is a beneficial practice for social workers to both maintain their general wellbeing and to perform their professional role efficaciously. For students, field education is a prime opportunity to put their newly acquired skills and knowledge of social worker self-care into practice. This article reports from a broader study on the ways social work students construct and practice self-care, with the focus of this article on a student cohort who completed placement during Covid-19 restrictions. To explore how Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students at an Australian university situated their understanding and practice of self-care within their final year placement, a textual analysis of 26 BSW student assessments, a 600-word critical reflection, was conducted. Two themes emerged from the student reflections. First, while engagement with Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) proved crucial for students to participate in student placement, it also created fresh challenges for their self-care practice. Second, students’ understanding and practice of self-care were critically shaped by their professional and academic peer environments. Knowledge of how social work students understand, and practice self-care is vital for social work educators to critically support student development during field education.

IMPLICATIONS

• Social work students’ self-care requires further nuanced conceptualisations, including addressing the role of ICTs in contemporary student field education placements.

• The use of peer groups supports student understanding of self-care during field education.

• Higher education providers can create further opportunities for formal peer connection during placements to embed self and collective care into students’ emerging practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Field Education
• Self-care
• Information Communication Technologies (ICTs)
• Pandemic Practice
• Burnout
• Social Work
• Social Work Placement

As a signature pedagogy of social work education, field education plays an essential role in the development of social work students’ skills, knowledge, and capacity for critical reflection (Lewis & King, 2019). Several key concepts introduced in the classroom, such as social worker self-care are explored by students during the experience of field placements (Lewis & King, 2019). As students progress in field education, they become further socialised into the profession and are expected to construct their practice of self-care on placements (O’Keeffe et al., 2019). However, the ways students understand theories related to professional worker self-care during their field education are less examined in social work research. This article outlines the findings of a study exploring final placement students’ critical reflections on their understanding and practice of self-care while completing their field education in Australia during Covid-19 restrictions.

Self-care Understandings and Students on Placement

Students studying social work canvas multiple understandings of self-care throughout their studies, as social work literature constructs self-care in several ways (Collins, 2021). Numerous definitions of self-care identify strategies to promote and maintain individual social worker wellbeing to achieve a sense of equilibrium between what is personal and what is professional (Bressi & Vaden, 2017; Lee et al., 2011). Lee and Miller (2013, p. 98) identified two domains of self-care, personal and professional. Personal self-care is defined as “a process of purposeful engagement in practices that promote holistic health and well-being of the self” (Lee & Miller, 2013, p. 98). Professional self-care is, “the process of purposeful engagement in practices that promote effective and appropriate use of the self in the professional role within the context of sustaining holistic health and well-being” (Lee & Miller, 2013, p. 98). Other definitions of social worker self-care identify the activities that can be performed within multiple life domains, such as physical and mental health, and social relationships, to maintain the capacity for social workers to perform their role (Bloomquist et al., 2015; Butler et al., 2019). The interconnectedness between the professional role and personal self (Dorociak et al., 2017), and the reciprocity of worker and service user relationships (Bressi & Vaden, 2017), also have been emphasised in framings of self-care. Dorociak et al. (2017) highlighted that the personal and professional have intersecting boundaries that cannot be separated when conceptualising self-care. Bressi and Vaden’s (2017) definition of self-care emphasised the reciprocity of relationships that social workers form with service users as a source of meaning, reconsidering the need for social workers to attain a balance between what is considered personal and professional.

Critique of self-care discourses challenged individualisation of responsibility for social worker self-care (Newcomb, 2022b; Stuart, 2021; Willis & Molina, 2019), and look to more reciprocal or collective models (Bressi & Vaden, 2017; Wever & Zell, 2017), where the interdependence between self and the collective also were acknowledged (Tusasiirwe & Brito, 2022). Stuart (2021) argued that neoliberal Western values of individualism are reflected in many self-care understandings and practices that solely look at individual responsibility for social workers’ wellbeing and capacity to perform their roles. Newcomb (2022a), and Newcomb and Venning (2022), add that many organisations use self-care as a form of risk management rhetoric. A collective model of self-care, as outlined by Wever and Zell (2017), challenged the Western-centric ideas that self-care is an individual activity and calls into question the cultural and political assumptions of individualistic models (Tusasiirwe & Brito, 2022). While there are various contested definitions or models of self-care that students are exposed to in their studies, the relevance of self-care for ethical social work practice is generally accepted (Dalphon, 2019).

There have been calls for self-care to be core to social work field education (Curry & Epley, 2022; DeMarchis et al., 2022; Lewis & King, 2019), and current social work curricula offer a focus on student self-care and wellbeing (Cox et al., 2021). However, self-care for students on placement inherently differs from some of the conceptualisations that they may be reading of professional practice, for several reasons. First, social work students in Australia are drawn from highly diverse backgrounds, and individualistic self-care models (Tusasiirwe & Brito, 2022; Willis & Molina, 2019) may not align with their own lived experiences (Pyles, 2020). There also exists a role for informal and formal peer-based communities of support, not only to promote the development of professional skills but to encourage self-care practices (Scourfield, 2017). Second, the responsibility for self-care curriculum is not exclusive to tertiary educators during field education, rather it is shared with organisations and field educators whom students engage with during placement (DeMarchis et al., 2022). Lastly, many professional self-care models do not account for the unique role and context of social work students, where structural issues due to lengthy unpaid placements, such as poverty and adverse mental health outcomes can negatively impact them (Gair & Baglow, 2018; Hodge et al., 2021).

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Placements During Covid-19 Restrictions

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated public health restrictions created fresh challenges to student learning during placements (Apgar & Cadmus, 2021). Field education went from traditional in-person, agency experiences to many organisations working online, requiring students to engage remotely from their homes (Zuchowski et al., 2022). For field education programs to continue to operate, the Australian Association of Social Workers endorsed the Australian Heads of Social Work Schools Council, “Covid-19 Parameters” (AASW, 2020), allowing for a principle-based approach to designing learning experiences for field education (Crisp et al., 2021). The Covid-19 Parameters (AASW, 2020) allowed for several structural changes in field education, presenting opportunities for placement innovations (Morley & Clarke, 2020). To minimise disruption to student education, many social work programs shifted to ICT-supported online programs out of necessity (Azman et al., 2020). ICTs were a popular choice due to the already extreme work pressure and workloads on both educators and field placement supervisors (Cleak & Zuchowski, 2020). ICTs created the ideal environment for peer-based online communities of support (Giffords, 2009; Scourfield, 2017), many of which emerged organically. ICTs also facilitated supportive online peer-based learning and peer-driven supervision, which proved critical points of learning and support for many students throughout the pandemic (Ferreira, 2022; Flaherty, 2022). However, while some of these approaches positively challenged existing ideas of what field education learning constitutes (Crisp et al., 2021), these new structures created uncharted issues for students, their field educators, and universities (Zuchowski et al., 2022).

In many respects remote, online learning and field placement options proved successful, particularly regarding maintaining professional communication, and contact with colleagues and academic supervisors (Saltzman et al., 2021). While scholars had been calling for greater utilisation of ICTs in social work practice (Gillingham, 2016), the pandemic accelerated this process. However, the nature of the rollout was characterised as rushed (Sarbu & Unwin, 2021), with many practitioners feeling unprepared (Ashcroft et al., 2022). This was not the approach ICT proponents had been advocating for (Boddy & Dominelli, 2017; Taylor, 2017).

Moving field education online may have impacted students’ ability to engage critically with institutional power structures, one of the foundations of the social work profession (Crisp & Hosken, 2016), and to gain important immediate feedback on their practice (Kourgiantakis et al., 2019). Legitimate privacy and security concerns also have been raised regarding students’ use of a single device, in most cases their smartphone, to conduct placement activities, which blurred the distinction between work and personal life (Harris & Stout, 2022; O'Neill et al., 2022). In addition, field education is a critical socialisation into the professional social work environment, allowing for learning, networking, and skill development to locate support outside of the tertiary environment (Kloppenburg et al., 2019; Sarbu & Unwin, 2021). Given the demand for both a rapid response and the concerns over student progression in their programs, ICTs were an ideal short-term solution (Saltzman et al., 2021), however, the ongoing role of ICTs in field placement continues to be investigated. How social work students’ self-care was impacted and enacted while completing online field education during the Covid-19 pandemic can contribute to this literature.

Method

This project was conceived in late 2019 just prior to the declaration of the global Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. Therefore, all student participants had completed at least one student placement during lockdowns, with many completing their entire field placement requirements during the pandemic. Thus, while not originally a focus of the research project, it would be amiss not to address the COVID-19-sized “elephant in the room” as every student response touched on the impact of the pandemic on all aspects of their placement learning. The broader study this article is drawn from examined the ways students conceptualise and operationalise self-care during their field education placements. The aim was to explore student conceptualisations of self-care on placement, using student critical reflections along with focus group discussions with field educators on their perspectives on student self-care. Ethical clearance for this research project was obtained through the Human Research Ethics Committee, Western Sydney University.

The student participants in this study were drawn from a fourth-year, semester two field placement unit attending a large Australian university. For many students passing this placement unit was the final requirement to graduate. At the completion of this field education unit which incorporated university-based tutorials and weekly peer group meetings, students submitted their final assessment, a 600-word personal narrative critical reflection on their placement experiences. The task required students to demonstrate critical reflection on their placement, including their discussions and attendance with their peer groups. The requirements of the field education unit were unchanged over Covid-19, however in-person classes were moved online. These classes offered an opportunity for students to reflect on their field placement experiences with peers and teachers. Readings, tutorial activities, and weekly peer group topics examined self-care, including examples of inventories, self-assessments, and self-care plans. Once the personal reflections were graded and returned to the students, the cohort was invited to participate in the study. Participation in this research required no additional work or time commitments from the students. A key strength of this dataset was that students were not aware of the research project prior to submitting their assessment.

To minimise the risk of potential identification, the students’ data was collected, de-identified, allocated culturally sensitive pseudonyms, and preliminarily coded by the third author, who was external to the teaching unit with no prior contact with any of the BSW students. The first author also was external to the university but had prior experience at the university as a field education academic, and the second author had direct teaching responsibility for the field education unit. A thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) was conducted across the student critical reflections to identify themes. A thematic analysis is ideal for learning and teaching research contexts, such as this study, due to its flexible nature which is, “not tied to a particular epistemological or theoretical perspective” (Maguire & Delahunt, 2017, p. 3352).

Of the 191 students enrolled in the field placement 26 (23 identifying as female and three as male) gave consent for their critical reflection submission to be included in the research project, a response rate of 15%. The age range of participants was 22–65 years, representing an ideal mix of mature-aged and direct-from-school participants. The cohort was drawn from a university that has traditionally attracted a higher number of low-SES students from varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Due to strict anonymity protocols utilised in this project, demographic profiles for each participant were not available.

Results

This study found that while students faced fresh challenges completing field education using ICTs for social work placements, participation in academic peer groups was critical to students’ understanding and practice of self-care. Two themes emerged from the student reflections.

1. Self-care was a challenging proposition when completing placements online using ICTs.

2. Self-care was understood and practised by students within a supportive professional, academic, and peer environment.

Self-care was a Challenging Proposition When Completing Placements Online Using ICTs

ICTs played a significant role in ensuring that placements continued during the Covid-19 lockdowns. In many cases, the digital space was where student placement learning occurred, rather than within a physical agency location. As Lena observed: “ … [the] majority of my placement has been completed online while working from home”. The rapid transformation of the educational and field placement experience towards online engagement and working from home resulted in students attempting to adjust to lockdowns and a new placement concurrently. Lockdowns were a stressor for many students already struggling to juggle their existing roles, as noted by Anh:

From my peer group discussion, it was clear that we have all been affected due to the lockdown restrictions brought by the Covid-19 pandemic. This resulted in many of the group members, including myself, having extreme difficulty separating our personal and work life.

The stress of the rapid shift to online learning also was captured by Linh: “Having to shift our placement learning experience to digital platforms by being online full time has produced new forms of stresses, dilemmas, and difficulties”.

Overall, access and use of ICTs ranged from being deeply embedded into positive placement learning experiences, to being a point of disconnection. As they met with their peer groups across their placements, students recalled the different approaches to ICT used by the varying placement providers. While many students noted their gratitude for being able to participate in placement, some found that the lack of reliable access to ICT itself was a barrier to learning, as Mary observed: “Generally, we all had challenges in internet connection and most of the time we were unable to contact the clients and our supervisor on time”.

ICT's usage also varied across platforms and students gained experience in using these mediums with varying learning outcomes as summarised by Claudia:

The main source of communication while working from home was through email, phone calls and Microsoft Teams. This experience has helped me to step out of my comfort zone, as working and speaking with people who I do not know can be daunting.

Nura explained that in their placement agency, the ways ICTs and online spaces were able to be accessed as a student formed a barrier to their broader engagement in placement:

We were often being left out of staff meetings, zoom sessions, inter-agency meetings and other experiences for learning because everything was now online. I stated to my peers that I felt uncomfortable asking to participate in these sessions as I still did not feel like I had built a strong relationship foundation with [placement organisation], the teachers and my supervisor.

Yet, for Mia, engaging through ICTs provided a safer platform to express ideas while on placement: “ … being moved to an online setting increased my confidence in working with clients and other staff, especially when communicating my views”. Garbine agreed, reflecting that ICTs had a greater role to play in social work practice, despite any challenges experienced in placement: “I have learned [sic] how technology contributes to creating a secure way for people at risk to stay connected. I realised that such technology empowers women and gives them opportunities to develop in their lives and feel safer”.

Still, the nature of placements, primarily experienced through ICTs during Covid-19 restrictions, created fresh challenges for learning and practising self-care for students. Two years of a pandemic, over the course of completing a social work degree meant for students, like Zehra, self-care was an added burden of “things to do”: “When beginning the process of reflecting on my practice, in the context of self-care, it is almost stress-inducing … peer group discussions show that everyone is facing their own varied challenges”. Karen embodied Zehra sentiments:

I often feel that the other people in my class are much better at carving out time for self-care. An example of this is mid-class when we have a fifteen-minute meditation, the [peer] group texts stop while my friends meditate, and I snap into action, ensuring morning tea has been arranged, fielding home-schooling questions and reheating my coffee in the hope that I'll make it through the day.

Students’ construction of self-care included the concepts of boundaries and balance, which they felt were useful for their future practice. Emilia noted the need to develop healthy boundaries when working from home, “I had to set boundaries of when I could think and talk about placement [this] has allowed me to develop a self-care plan which I can rely on as a future social worker”. Karen drew on the importance of reflection as an ongoing practice to create balance for them as a future social worker, while noting the structural conditions and responsibilities for wellbeing:

Reflective practice allows me to understand that I need to balance the best outcome (given restrictive circumstances) for service uses and self-preservation in the same way that I need to balance task completion and self-care. Part of this balance comes with organisations supporting this balance.

Overall, students were often able to reflect on the ways that working through ICTs during placement, rather than through physical presence, and its subsequent impact on their ability to self-care, was a formative experience for their future careers, as Claudia noted: “I have developed resilience to manage unforeseen circumstances and everyday work challenges”.

Self-care was Understood and Practised Within a Supportive Professional, Academic Peer Environment

Students’ notions and self-care practices also were informed through peer group interactions. Peer groups allowed students to share their concerns and support each other to act on ways to self-care while on placement. As Emilia stated: “My peer group shared some of their strategies … Therefore, [over] the next few days, I started to partake in self-care strategies, which allowed my stress and worry to decrease and allowed my well-being to improve”.

Peer group and supervision sessions were critical avenues of support when experimenting with or trying to implement self-care practices. Anna recounts an example from her peer group, where they addressed the experiences of one student as a collective:

She [a peer group member] had shared that she felt overwhelmed with the suicidal telephone calls she was receiving [at her placement] and felt close to burnout. This affected the group, we rally [sic] together to explore her experience in a safe way. This led the group to discuss self-care techniques and strategies that might be helpful in this situation.

Aurora reported, “the peer group helped me realise the importance of being in a supportive environment when implementing self-care”, and Anh stated, “through my engagement in my placement supervision and participation in peer group discussions, I was able to recognise the importance of self-care for social workers”. Similarly, Martin noted, “after discussions with my group and support from my supervisors, I was able to have a greater focus on my self-care”.

As students shared their challenges, they also became accountable to each other, thus creating an impetus to practice between peer sessions, as Monica recalled:

Through discussing methods of self-care with my peer group it dawned on myself [sic] that all students within our group recognised the importance but lacked time to participate in self-care. From this I have made an effort to block time out of the week to relax and do something I enjoy.

Collective ideas about self-care featured in many reflections, with students documenting their shared strategies. Allen noted the peer group identified new, uncharted ways to self-care together: “we had to be creative and improvise by implementing new self-care strategies”. Finally, as Karen highlights through developing their practice of self-care within a peer group, students stated an ongoing commitment to self-care after graduation: “in these peer group activities and within supervision … self-care that had seemed like an unattainable goal is in fact an essential part of my future social work practice”.

Discussion

This study aimed to explore the ways social work students understood and practiced self-care during their placement. The study’s findings show that the use of peer groups as part of field education may enable students to see how self-care can support their emerging professional careers in social work.

Though pre pandemic scholars called for a more significant role for ICTs in social work practice (Taylor, 2017), the pandemic accelerated the integration of digital technology into all aspects of social work, creating a “pandemic practice” (Ashcroft et al., 2022). Social work students on placements in this study during this time learned about their emerging practice within a rapidly changing practice landscape. They were witness to their field educators and agencies managing fundamental shifts to social work practice and service delivery in online spaces, which required skills, knowledge, and access that many were not prepared for (Newcomb & Venning, 2022). Students in this study experienced what Zuchowski et al. (2022) research also found, that online placements created mixed experiences for students, requiring them to demonstrate high levels of self-driven learning to participate.

Students in this study began to understand and practice their knowledge of self-care within their peer group. Scourfield (2017) highlighted the importance of peer groups for student social workers’ development of skills and knowledge. For students in this study, peer groups were a foundation for understanding and exploring the importance of self-care practice. These groups were part of their field education unit and conceptualised as both part of their unit requirement and a form of self and collective care. Feedback about their practice, identified as critical to student learning on placement, such as through supervision (Kourgiantakis et al., 2019), also was gained through their peer groups. While other student-valued learning activities, such as direct observation of social workers or live feedback on skills were limited during their field education (Sarbu & Unwin, 2021), students who participated in this study used their peer group to formulate, test, and reflect on their self-care practice. Unlike students in Sarbu and Unwin’s (2021) study on field education during Covid-19, these students did not note any issues with these peer groups being online and not in person, which is important, as due to the lockdowns they were not given a choice between these options. As their reflections outlined, students demonstrated care for each other, their collective experiences of learning, and an awareness of their collective wellbeing.

Although self-care curricula were included for this student cohort, meeting the broader call for this to occur in social work education programs (Curry & Epley, 2022), the students utilised group creativity to improvise self-care in ways that were more aligned with their experience of placement. Students’ reflections spoke to a collective approach, testing existing understandings of self-care as being individually negotiated (Stuart, 2021). Though consideration for ICTs in self-care conceptualisations is currently limited (Harris & Stout, 2022), the personal/professional balance approach to self-care, previously argued as constraining (Bressi & Vaden, 2017), was further disrupted by students in this study. As boundaries of placement blurred, with students completing placements online in their own homes, existing understandings of self-care no longer fully served these students’ (and indeed their field educators’) experiences. Yet, the idea of balance was still attempted to be struck by many of the students in this study who questioned their ability to self-care as competently as their peers.

For students in this study, many existing models of self-care they operationalised did not fully acknowledge their unique role as emerging social workers on placement. For students to see the relevance of self-care curriculum during field education, models of self-care for social work students on placement need to acknowledge their experiences of the shared accountability of higher education providers and regulatory bodies, field educators, and agencies (DeMarchis et al., 2022). Students in this study began to see the importance of self-care through their collective experiences. To further address the gap between theory and practice for students, emphasis on critical and collective models (Wever & Zell, 2017), may be a more appropriate social work response to creating wellbeing, as this approach aligns with other areas of curriculum and peer pedagogies in social work. As the full demographic data was not able to be collected from students in this study, further research into the cultural understanding of self-care and how this impacts students’ ability to apply theory to practice, is needed.

Limitations

As this study was based on a reflective assessment piece that was submitted for an assignment, students shaped their reflections for this purpose, perhaps omitting some of the more challenging aspects of their placement experience, personal wellbeing, and understanding of self-care. Whilst this qualitative study provided rich reflective descriptions, the sample size was small, self-selected, and located in one university. The variation between placement locations was not accounted for in the analysis as this would have identified participants to one of the research team members, so further nuances regarding agencies, field educators, or contexts of practice have not been investigated. This study is part of a broader research project that includes reflections from field educators, so their perspectives were not included here.

Conclusion

Covid-19 and the accompanying restrictions fundamentally changed social work field education structures and experiences. Students on placement at this time navigated fresh challenges to social work practice, both to the nature of its delivery and the ways in which they conceptualised existing key concepts, such as self-care. The use of peer groups proved critical in supporting student understanding and practice of self-care during their placement. Post Covid, higher education providers can create opportunities for formal peer connection during placements while canvasing critical, social, and inclusive models of self-care, which take the students unique role and experiences of social work field education practice into account.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Western Sydney University.