Narratives of Conflict in Field Education
While poised at the interface of community and university and immersed in the complexities of practice and its theoretical underpinnings, students are exposed to competing understandings about what it means to think and act as professionals. Consequently, field education is frequently characterized by conflicts involving the triad of student, field instructor and faculty liaison. Yet conflict in professional education is poorly understood (Fox, 1998; Beach & Pearson, 1998; Rogers et al, 2003).
This presentation reports on the in-depth analysis of a case from social work. This case is part of a larger data set derived from the findings of a federally funded qualitative study designed to understand how students, field instructors and faculty liaisons from the professions of social work, nursing, medicine and education experienced, constructed and negotiated conflict in field education. That conflict was not necessarily problematic in professional education was a primary assumption of the study. Conflict was seen as a crucial site for the production and legitimization of particular kinds of professional identities and particular truths about what constitutes knowledge and best practices in the respective professions participating in the study. In the case of social work, it is practice in a nonprofit social service agency that is examined.
Through the use of a collective case study design (Berg, 2001) based on unstructured interviews with members of field education triads (student, field instructor and faculty liaison) in the four Faculties, data emerged that cast light on how conflict was experienced and negotiated. The social work data was derived from in-depth interviews with a student in her senior undergraduate practicum, her field instructor and faculty liaison. They were each interviewed three separate times over one semester.
Analysis of this fascinating case in social work has contributed to the conceptualization of the nature of conflict experienced by members of the triad and explored how individual members worked differences. These findings, along with a discussion of implications for social work programs, form the basis of the presentation on the narratives of conflict in field education.