The Social Work Programme gives greater emphasis to fieldwork education. Learning by doing is the pedagogical approach that is adopted. Fieldwork-based learning phases are spread across the two years of the Master’s programme in Social Work. It carries a weightage of around 28% in the overall curriculum. In the first year of the M.A. programme in Social Work, fieldwork is generic and aims at developing perspectives, understanding practice roles and learning intervention skills. Student learning is thus directed towards understanding the contexts of engagement and core practice issues. Building on the foundation courses and core social work courses offered in the first year, students are expected to integrate theory with practice, by bringing back their learning from the field to the classroom and vice-versa. Fieldwork thus provides students the opportunity to learn, understand, integrate and apply the different facets of social work practice. Fieldwork education carries a weightage of 12 credits in the first year.

First year field work, in particular, seeks to develop capacities of students by introducing them to Social Work Methods and Processes. It also aims at providing opportunity for Interactions with a wide-ranging people, issues and sectors. It simultaneously fosters experiential learning of social work values, principles and ethics. Students are facilitated in developing the ability to critically reflect on self, Organisation, Social structure and Systems, and assimilate learning through the guided process of fieldwork supervision. It runs concurrently with classroom inputs and requires the student to complete fifteen hours of fieldwork over two specified days a week, with the field based organization that he/she has been placed at.  Students are placed across a diverse range of organizations and settings, which are anchored by the eight centres.

The first year fieldwork programme is administered by a full time team that is based within the School of Social Work. It comprises a fieldwork coordinator and two fieldwork supervisors, all of whom have extensive experience as social work practitioners and also as field work supervisors. This team is also a part of a larger Fieldwork Secretariat, which includes representatives from each of the Centres.

The second year fieldwork are programme specific. Across two semesters, it carries a weightage of 12 credits. The details of the second year fieldwork is available in the respective Centre’s website.