The Faculty Field Liaison: An Essential Role for Advancing Graduate and Undergraduate Group Work Education

Abstract

The faculty field liaison is responsible for representing a school's social work program in monitoring agency internship sites and agency field instructors for an assigned cohort of the program's BSW or MSW internship students. This article focuses on the faculty field liaison's role in effectively monitoring the internship site and field instruction to ensure the internship experience is successfully providing the group work skills and knowledge the BSW or MSW student intern needs to be an effective group work practitioner. The field instructor role has been given a lot of attention in the social work literature, but the role of the faculty field liaison has been given little to no attention. This is despite the faculty field liaison's significant responsibility of representing the BSW and MSW program by bridging the relationships between the program, the field instructor, and the internship student. This article identifies the importance of the faculty field liaison responding to concerns in group work education in the classroom and field setting. Practice vignettes illustrating the work of the faculty field liaison in monitoring group work assignments and field instruction supervision for graduate and undergraduate social work interns are provided.

Making sense of the social work field education liaison role and impacts of neoliberalism: An invitation to reflect and reimagine!

“…Ligon & Ward (2005) further note that research and literature in relation to the liaison role has been scant recently and historically. Egan & Hill (2020), Tully (2005) and Zuchowski (2015) supports this in highlighting that although the field liaison holds a key role in field education minimal attention has been given to the role in the literature. In the review of literature for this piece the author can confirm that the literature on the liaison role was scant with far more emphasis and focus on the role of the field educator/professional supervisor.…”

“…With the perceived high costs associated with running a quality field education program it has become a vulnerable low hanging fruit for the neoliberal managerialist cost cutting agenda in the higher education sector (Cleak & Venville, 2018;Morley & Dunstan, 2013). While the tangible function of assessment and administration may be recognized by management and allocated in workloads other elements such as teaching (Agllias, Wendy, Cassano, Collingrindge, Dawood, Irwin, Lukic, Maywald, McKinnon, Noble, O'Sullivan, Wexler, & Zubrzycki, 2010;Egan & Hill, 2020;Faria, Brownstein & Smith, 1988;Olson-Morrison, et al, 2019;Rosenblum & Raphael, 1983;Smith, Faria, & Brownstien, 1986;) and relationship building (Cleak & Venville, 2018;Tully, 2005) seem to be undervalued and overlooked in workload allocation transferring these elements into the invisible workload of the academic. However, while undervalued and made invisible by management the relationship with the liaison person is often identified as most valued by students and field educators (Anderson, Drechsler, Hessenauer & Clark, 2019).…”

Faculty Members’ Perceptions toward Accreditation Process at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Indonesia: A Research Agenda

“…However, only a few studies have explored faculty perceptions of accreditation purposes and processes in higher education systems (Provezis, 2010;Tsevelragchaa, 2012). It is apparent that faculty members' perspectives in accreditation are essential as they are intimately involved in the implementation of educational policies (Tully, 2015).…”