Equity in Field Education: Measuring the Impact of an Employment-Based Internship Model

Overview: One Field Program centered ethical and equity-based considerations in developing a program to support students to use their employment as their internship during COVID. Through formal evaluation, the program measured the impact of the pilot year of the model for students and community partners.Proposal text: As COVID-19 ravaged the world, in June 2020 CSWE adopted a temporary response to support field programs to allow students to intern through their current employment position. This response was congruent with adaptations that one Field Education Program had long been considering based on student feedback, experience, and ongoing assessment of how effectively we were enacting policy that truly supported our commitments to equity while enacting social work values in practice. As COVID highlighted additional layers of privilege and oppression, disproportionately negatively impacting BIPOC individuals and communities, this field program centered ethical and equity-based considerations. By July 2020 the program conceptualized, developed, and launched a formal pilot Employed Social Work Internship (ESWI) program which invited students to apply to use their current employment position as their educational internship.
A formal evaluation was conducted in spring 2021 by the Director of Field, a faculty field colleague, and a community social work evaluator. Our analysis, completed in summer 2021, seeks to understand the overall experience of students and community partners by asking: What have been the benefits and challenges of the ESWI model for BSW and MSW students?, What have been the benefits and challenges of the ESWI model for community partners?, and What are implementation lessons learned from the pilot? Additionally, the analysis explores how experiences were shaped by characteristics such as placement type (BSW or MSW), field of practice, length of employment, supervisory support, colleague support, and student demographics. Data is being used to continue honing the model.
For too long, students in social work programs across the country have questioned the viability of unpaid internships. For example, in 2017, this School’s Student of Color Caucus (SOCC) presented a set of “expectations” to the School including their request that we “recogniz[ing] the heavy burden in requiring students to pay thousands of dollars to perform labor, and that this requirement of unpaid/pay-to-play labor is a serious bar to economically strained students and vastly privileges those who can afford to do this.” (p.10). While this pilot program doesn’t support every student to engage in a paid internship, it is one approach to being responsive to constituent needs (the student) as well as community agency needs for more competent and ethically trained staff. The success of this model has implications for recruitment and retention of students to schools of social work.
Our experience confirms that it is possible to tailor a student's current employment position to be utilized as their required educational internship. When the internship criteria established by CSWE and the Field Program can be met by the agency, a student’s practice is enhanced and the agency benefits from their integration of theory into their current practice.
Though it launched in response to the pandemic, this new ESWI model represents one strategy to address long-standing inequities in social work education. The ESWI pilot is a significant step toward creating equity in field education.