Learning ‘at work’ during social work education:

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe and analyse the learning processes of Swedish social work students during and after periods of workplace-based learning. The article describes the process in which the practice learning opportunities that the students have been involved in are reflected upon, discussed, problematised and theorised, both in a series of workshops and via the process of the narrative description of critical incidents. Practice learning opportunities form an integral part of studies of social work in the Social Pedagogy program at the University West in Sweden, where a reflective approach to both campus and practice learning has been developed. In presenting the analysis of the reflective approach to studies of social work the article draws on both Scandinavian and international research and presents Säljö’s theory of situated learning and Nielsen & Kvale’s theory of Mesterlaerer in the analysis of the critical incident narratives of two individual social work students.