Fieldwork education in community organization: privileging the process of political engagement

This article focuses on fieldwork education in community organization (CO) and argues that it is distinct in many ways from the conventional social work approach to problem-solving where social work students are taught to value objectivity, neutrality and emotional detachment. Fieldwork is generally characterized as unproblematic and the belief that 'all social work students do the same thing' through field instruction is reflected in the fact that, except for a manual or two, there is scant academic literature on fieldwork instruction in India. When the sites of practice and the nature of tasks performed by students are examined carefully, this homogenized understanding is challenged. The pedagogical objectives and the processes followed in selecting sites of practice for educational purposes, the positionality assumed by the academic department and by the fieldwork supervisor, and how these are communicated to the students, all make a significant difference to 'the fieldwork' experience of students and their learning. The paper presents the experience of one university (the Tata Institute of Social Sciences) where fieldwork in CO was consciously re-defined as a process of political engagement over a decade of collective work by faculty members.