Building Professional Practice Education Cultures in the Online Environment - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 124

socialwork). Our web of partnerships within Nova
Scotia and across Canada enables a wide range of
placement settings according to the learning needs
and goals of our students. Further, as a school
committed to social transformation, students in
their field placements are primary agents through
which the ideologies, analyses and practices of
critical, anti-oppressive practice are taken from
the academy into the community. In so doing, our
social work students are in the position to influence
the prevailing discourses across the profession
and practicum contexts, expanding and enacting
the messages of social change.
Social work students at both the undergradu-
ate and graduate levels of study undertake a field
education course. Second year Bachelor of Social
Work students have one field education course that
runs for 550 hours. Of these, twenty-four hours
are allotted to participation in the online seminars,
with the remainder taken up in the placement
agency. Master of Social Work students have one
field education course of 450 hours, 30 hours of
which include participation in the seminar, with
the balance occurring in the placement agency.
The seminar is comprised of a small group of
10-14 students who attend concurrently with
completion of their agency placement hours. A
faculty person facilitates the seminars, coordinates
regular visits to the agencies and is responsible for
evaluation of the field course. The faculty person
is the primary school liaison for the student. The
Agency Field Instructor, who is the supervisor
in the field agency, provides onsite supervision
and instruction while the student is in the agency
based placement.
The online field education seminar which
accompanies the field placement provides the
opportunity for group discussion of issues, chal-
lenges, provocations and learning encountered
by students in the field agencies. In this setting
students reflect on and debrief their experiences
in their placements and seek to integrate their
academic learning with their practice experiences.
The structure and format is largely student led,

with the faculty person prompting questions and
facilitating discussion regarding the translation of
social work theory, knowledge and skills into the
practice setting. This seminar is often experienced
by the students to be a central site for the articula-
tion of their evolving framework for practice, the
constellation of ideology, theory, ethics, insights
and skills that are honed throughout their degree
and carried forward after their graduation. Hav-
ing a specified space to pause for thought and
consider the integration of their academic educa-
tion with the practice based education is integral
to the delivery of field education at Dalhousie
SSW and a foundational component of the stu-
dent experience. In keeping with the experiential
learning cycle of Kolb, it is in the seminar that
students have the peer support and facilitation
to abstract from their concrete experiences and
consider alternatives, new ideas and insights as
they continue on in their placements. Being in a
peer environment can stimulate greater depths of
this reflection, as many minds can perhaps more
likely tease out various and diverging perspectives
on one situation. Sharing and contrasting direct
practice skills, analysing complex circumstances
of people's lives and extending the possibilities for
advocacy on behalf of our clients are all enhanced
when several minds are engaged.
Technological tools used to facilitate and en-
hance the social networks within the online courses
at Dalhousie University's School of Social Work
draw largely on asynchronistic discussion boards
and private email functions. In addition, the voice
board feature allows for recorded messages, which
can appeal to an auditory learning style as well as
provide an alternate means for engagement, be-
yond the written text. Synchronistic text based chat
(in the style of Instant Messaging) and voice-over
Internet protocol (voice based chat) are options
for students and faculty seeking to interact with
a sense of proximity and immediacy. Finally, the
“live classroom” option, which supports real time
synchronistic video learning, is available for the
online seminar, offering an option closest to the