Welcome to the Spring 2014 issue of the Field Educator! This will be our fifth issue since the journal’s inception in 2011. We are pleased to report that we now have 1316 active subscribers, and the journal’s webpage had almost 25,000 visits last year. Furthermore, we’re broadening the reach of the journal by spreading it in new formats; in response to popular demand for multiple ways to access Field Educator articles, we have created PDFs of all of our Field Educator articles in order to make it easier for you to share individual articles with students and colleagues. Thank you to the Field Educator community of scholars, educators, field instructors, and students.
The Field Scholar article in this issue is “Inside/outside training: A campus-based field unit approach for working with veterans” by Katherine Selber and Nancy Chavkin of Texas State University, San Marco. The Practice Digest section opens with an essay by Diana Cooper-Bolinskey and Angela Napier of Indiana State University asking, “Should end-measures for every competency and practice behavior come from field practicum evaluation?” The next article, “Gimme that old-time reflection,” reviews the role of process recording in promoting student reflection. This issue of the Field Educator has a strong student presence. Students Daniel Wright III and Sandra Morales collaborated with Naomi White, field coordinator, to describe their experience in developing an internship for a student with physical disabilities at the University of Akron School of Social Work. Student Carlin Blount collaborated with Kim Kelly Harriman, Director of Field Education at the Simmons School of Social Work (and new editor of the Field Educator), on an article about the Affordable Care Act and social work field education. Students Speak begins with “Reflections of a career changer” by Nicole Frankel, the esteemed student editorial assistant for the Field Educator, who is graduating this spring. The section continues with an article on compassion fatigue in social work students by Miranda Smith at University of Nevada, Reno. Naomi Olson, a Simmons student, enlivens the debate about process recording in her article, “Field placement as an ethnographic opportunity.” Simmons School of Social Work students are keeping the Life in the Field blog active with frequent posts, including writing about changing from an EMT to a social work intern, moving from classroom to field, and learning non-abusive psychological and physical intervention (NAPPI).
Other sections of the journal contain important information for field educators. In the Conversation, Betsy Voshel, director of field education at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work, interviews Shelley Cohen Konrad, director of the University of New England’s Center for Inter-professional Education. The Center promotes educational programming and collaborative practice across health professions, including social work. The News section features a report from Jo Ann McFall from the CSWE Field Council, as well as a call for feedback on the second draft of the Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). In Kudos, Deborah Winters of the University of Southern California presents the 2013 NANFED “Heart of Social Work” award to Nancy Jefferson Mance, a social worker at the Los Angeles Unified School District, for twenty years of field instruction in the USC pupil personnel school (PPS) credential sub-concentration. What We’re Reading summarizes recent field articles, including a number of essays on gatekeeping from the UK Journal of Practice Teaching and Learning.
I am retiring this year after 25 years in the field department at the Simmons School of Social Work, leaving the Field Educator in the capable hands of the Executive Editor, Suzanne Sankar, and the new Editor, Kim Harriman. I will sorely miss every one of the field educators (and students) who contributed to the journal—submitting articles, reviewing manuscripts, sharing news, and schmoozing at conferences. I am inordinately proud of field education, and of the Field Educator journal. In closing, I’d like to leave you all with a poem: Charge to the Field Brigade (my apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson; parse it if you can).
Let our voices be heard!