Field education research: opportunities for collaboration and advancing social work education

[Extract] I am generally pragmatic and goal oriented, so, when I started thinking about a PhD I chose a topic that was connected to my work (field education) and presented an unanswered question I had (how do students fare in placements with external supervision?). Little did I know what a wonderful journey towards research partnerships and collaborations was ahead of me. When I started on this research journey in 2010 there was a sense that there was not that much research about field education out there. Well there wasn’t that much available, particularly when looking at my specific area of interest, but I would argue today, that field education research is an active space and, lots of good work is being done. My guess is that lots of it is done by overstretched field education academics and professional staff without much, if any, funding, so the projects are often small and likely primarily reported on at conferences