Developing Self-Efficacy in MSW Students Through Service-Learning

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Developing Self-Efficacy 4Within the current social work education field, however, service-learning is anecdotally viewedby social work educators as interchangeable with the field practicum, a pivotal, experientially based,and mandated model for professional training and development. Field placements typically occur in avariety of social work settings as a way to integrate academic coursework with practice skilldevelopment. However, it has been posited that while the field practicum offers a rich and integrativeprocess of learning, it is a different learning experience than service learning (Kropf & Tracey, 2000).The field practicum is primarily focused on the student’s specific skill development as a practitioner,and the overarching goal for students in field placement is to focus on the student’s professional skilldevelopment coupled with the enhancement of their professional social work identity (Bogo & Vayda,1998). The field agency provides a laboratory for the student’s learning and while there may beoverlaps and benefits derived by the community, these are secondary to student learning needs. Theorganization becomes the vehicle to assist the student in this process and it occurs under the watchfulsupervision of an experienced social worker. While community service may be part of the tasksperformed, reciprocity with the community and the implicit lessons of civic responsibility is not thespecific goal even if it is a possible by-product (Nnakwe, 1999). In fact, it is more common to hearcomplaints from field instructors that students come to their placements unprepared for professionalpractice. Some researchers have even suggested that service learning courses can better prepareMaster’s level students for their practicum “jobs” (Kropf & Tracey, 2000).In contrast to the traditional field practicum, a service-learning course focuses on linkingstudents with activities that are meant to enhance the community irrespective of role-based learningneeds on the part of the student. As such, conceptually, service-learning may hold a particularfamiliarity for social workers, as many of the learning situations are compatible with social workpractice. However, while the learning focus in traditional classroom coursework typically involves
10 th International Conference on Urban Drainage, Copenhagen/Denmark, 21-26 August 2005organisation, as each scientific partner is in charge of the continuous contact with local endusers;this means numerous reminders via e-mail and telephone to the local partners. Thedelays caused by the difficulties in finding common meeting dates for partner and end-users,seem to be minor in national terms, but are accumulating at the project scale and result indifficulties in terms of project progress.On the other side, end-users complain not to be sufficiently informed on the overall projectadvancement. It was stated that the bi-annual DayWater newsletter does not contain enoughdetailed information and therefore does not replace a regular contact between the nationalscientific partner and the end-users, which demands availabilities on both sides. Despiteinviting all CEU to the annual project meetings and presenting them the demonstrations of allavailable ADSS components, their knowledge about the DayWater project is often limited tothe component developed by their respective national scientific partner.Common definition of ADSS structure and functionalitiesThe intrinsic difficulties of a multidisciplinary and multinational project are obvious. First ofall, even when scientific partners were working in the same field, there is a common languageto be found for the project inherent terms. It took a long time before every partner becameaware of such language problems. Such misunderstandings were both related to the commonuse of the English language, and to different cultural approaches, such as the way to beunderstood outside the scientific field. Different professional backgrounds may causedifferent definition of technical and trivial terms. Nearly all partners have experience ininternational projects and should therefore be aware of these kinds of problems, but there isstill a gap between the simple knowledge of the existence of these problems and the realisedawareness and resulting behaviour. A cautious behaviour means verification of e-mails orreports directly with the responsible person, in case of seemingly offensive statements. Thereis clearly a lack of understanding to be stated, which might be due to little willingness, towork overload or to ignorance of intercultural differences. Thus the personal encounters,during numerous work meetings, were found necessary for the success of the DayWaterdevelopment.Development of ADSS componentsThe ambition and expectations on the ADSS prototype were differing a lot during the firsttwo project years. At the beginning of the project, it was difficult to have a realistic frame ofall the interactions in the project due to its complexity. Each partner developed “his”components mostly independent to the other components and their mutual requirements. TheToR of the ADSS was expected to remediate this problem, demanding every componentdeveloper to describe his requirements and his contribution to the other components and to thegeneral ADSS structure. The partners felt not able to do so, as the inter-relations were onlydiscovered step by step, parallel to their development. This is in contradiction to the functionof the ToR, which should be the reference document to the prototype development.Furthermore the initial work plan did not specifically mention the dates of delivery of eachADSS component. This omission made it difficult to make each partner understand theconsequences, caused by delays within elaboration of their component specification andimplementation in the Web based ADSS tool.Attention to decision-making proceduresThe analysis of the decision-making process (DMP) in USWM projects is a good example forthis intercultural and interdisciplinary misunderstanding (Deutsch et al., 2004). Consultantengineers conceive the DMP in a different way than researchers and south European countriesdo not consider the DMP as north Europeans do. Thus it was found necessary to integrate, inD. Thévenot & M. Förster 5
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