Expanding Social Work Field Education: Illuminating a Sexual Wellness Practicum Site Through Collaborative Auto-Ethnography

Social work field education is strained often resulting in a shortage of quality sites; thus, demanding innovative approaches to securing practicum placements for social work students. Additionally, sexual health is rarely grounded in most social work curricula. A sexual health field education practicum placement provides an approach to address this chasm in social work pedagogy in an effort to create sexually literate social workers, and in turn, sexually healthy individuals and communities. Using queer theory, this collaborative autoethnography paper explores five social worker student practicum experiences in a sexual health field education placement. Thematic analysis was used to organize the data, identify themes, define themes, and identify relationships between themes resulting in five themes: (1) Professional Grounding, (2) Sexual Well-being is Social Work, (3) Cheerleaders and Antagonist, (4) Practicum Audit and (5) Knowledge Acquisition. This research demonstrates that a field education site specializing in sexual well-being can not only address the pedagogical challenge of little to no sexuality education in the social work academy but can facilitate student acquisition of professional knowledge, values and skills that are necessary for practice. Further, sexual health placement sites may help address an ongoing shortage of social work field education placement sites.