The invisible art of teaching for practice: Social workers' perceptions of taking students on placement

Abstract

There are values, knowledges and skills which social workers use in their everyday workplace tasks which are often undisclosed within official policy agendas. The more subtle everyday practices of social workers are rarely noticed in handbooks about techniques of ‘good practice’. Neither is this ‘invisible’ dimension understood or taken into account by those who draft policy or manage welfare bureaucracies. This theme is discussed in Pithouse's Social Work: The Social Organisation of an Invisible Trade (1987), which examines how workers in this invisible trade form a collegial identity, negotiate their way around official procedures and manage ‘artfully organisational rules’ which ‘dissolve into a welter of situational manoeuvres and motives that resolve the contingencies of practice’ (p.7). Like Pithouse, we attempt to unravel some of the minutiae and situational processes entailed in the ‘unofficial agenda’ of practice teaching and explore some of the discrete processes as carried out by ‘singleton’ practice teachers. We show how teaching for practice is an ‘invisible art’ which is cut across by a variety of situational factors, planning and workload problems and skills which are rarely acknowledged at a formal organisational level.