Students, Practica and Social Justice - issues and opportunities
This paper reports on the findings from a series of individual interviews and focus groups with students, field-based supervisors and academics. These interviews sought to explore firstly what were the issues for these stakeholders around social justice and practica; secondly, whether undergraduates on practica were able to notice, understand and transfer social justice practice skills into action.
Preliminary findings indicate that students on practica are ideally positioned to learn about the application of social justice principles to practice. A range of issues, relationships and constraints were identified. As expected experiencing the reality of peoples'disadvantage, the foregrounding of social justice concepts and language by their lecturers, the modelling by their field-based supervisor and having meaningful opportunities to reflect, all assisted students to articulate and integrate this learning in a way they considered would be accessible on graduation.