Field Work Practice with Communities

Q) Explain field work practice with communities based on your field work experience with examples.

Answer:

Field Work Practice With Communities: Social work with community involves under standing of needs of a community, facilitating interaction between the different parts of the community such as the institutions, leadership–informal and formal, other members and the geographical subdivisions. It facilitates maximum use of its internal and external resources.

Learning goals of field work practice with communities

• Students understand different communities– Urban, rural and tribal.
• Students require skills like skills in interacting with people, conflict management and resource mobilization.
• Understanding the needs of the communities and prioritizing their needs and assessing the strength of the communities.
• Understanding the importance of the communities and taking part in implementing the planned intervention.

Students may visit the local municipal office or the Panchayat office to collect information about the community– on population, households and occupation. Besides, students can carry out a survey of the community to collect information on the sex ratio, distribution of the population by caste and religion, family income and education.

Students should develop the skills of interacting with people both formally and informally and comprehend the outstanding felt needs of a community.

Students have to understand the politicization of development processes and anomalies in the community. There may be apathetic attitude from certain section of the community. The community organization should facilitate community integration and advocate self-help to the community. All sections of people have to be involved in the determination and solving the problems in the community. Communication networks between different interest groups in the community have to be developed.

In the interventions/initiatives undertaken, the members of the power structure as collaborators have to be involved. Students need to develop organizational skills. Problem solving and interactional skills help in reaching solutions for reconciliable differences of different members in the community.

The fieldwork content that the school of social work offer to its students determines the success of fieldwork practice. For example, effective community practice depends on the students’ understanding of the legal framework besides administrative principles to effectively participate in the learning process. Students need to have a sound knowledge of the resources available within the community becomes essential.

Social workers face the challenge of ensuring participation of different stakeholders and ensuring their support. The students should have a proper understanding of the concept of community and the nature of community problems. Social status, social stratification, power structure and the manifest and the latent functions of organizations are some relevant social science concepts.

The students should have an understanding that the services and work of the community agency cannot be viewed as ends in themselves but as parts of a larger entity like the communities’ themselves. Community work in only restricted to disadvantaged groups alone, it covers heterogeneous entities. The student also should teach the community a philosophy grounded in a basic commitment and the importance of a democratic approach in carrying our work.

The following are some of the skills relevant to community-based practice:

• Engagement Skills: It is required for developing relationship with staff, local residents and community leaders in unstructured and sometimes chaotic situations.
• Organizational Skills: It is required to build organizations, work with committees and organizing public events.
• Planning and Policy Skills: It is required for analysing issues and problems, to generalize from the specific and relate individual grievances to organizational responses.
• Action Skills: It is required to make decision in situation where all the relevant information is never available and strategize to meet the goal.
• Communication Skills: This is needed communicate with different stakeholders in different situations.
• Political Skills: It includes the knowledge of the sociology of political decision-making and a grasp of different varieties of political ideologies and their implication for change.

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