2.6 Practice
- Journal Prompt: What are you noticing about your placement? What surprised you about the agency, the work, or your own role? How is DEI addressed at your agency?
- Self-Care Activity: Using Your Journal for Self-Reflection. As mentioned at the end of Chapter 1, we will be giving suggestions for journal prompts and self-care activities at the end of each chapter of the text. For this chapter, we want to point out how using your journal for self-reflection can also be a self-care activity. If you perceive the journal entries as “homework,” or a chore to get through, you will lose some of the most important learning that can come from journaling. Keeping a fieldwork journal gives you a chance to really think about your experiences, and begin to understand your work and your place in the field. You can address the prompts as they pertain to your experiences, but you can also journal about other issues related to your placement. If you had a particularly difficult interaction with a client, for example. Journaling about it when it happens can give you some insight if you are faced with a similar situation in the future. The journal is meant to be a tool for you to be able to reflect on and use in the future.
- Class Discussion: While interacting with a client, they begin to ask questions that you are uncomfortable answering. The questions could be about your family, your school, or even “Where are you from?” You are not comfortable sharing these details about your personal life. You want to respond without being too rude or too revealing. There are four courses of action you can take. Get into groups and discuss the advantages and risks of each choice.
- Kindly let the client know that those are questions that you do not feel comfortable answering.
- Ask the client why those questions are important to them.
- Share what you are comfortable with if it will benefit the helper-client relationship without oversharing.
- Talk with your supervisor about the interaction.
2.6.1 Licenses and Attributions for Practice
Class Discussion from “Chapter 3: Getting Started at the Site” in Succeeding at Your Internship: A Handbook Written for and with Students by Christopher J Mruk and John C. Moor, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Journal Prompts and Self-Care Activity by Sally Guyer MSW and Yvonne M. Smith LCSW under CC BY 4.0.