Learning Social Accountability Through Social Work Field Education

In this chapter, we explore the development of social work field education by arguing that social audit fieldwork offers insight into the issues of diversity, reflexivity and local-to-global concerns in field education. Here, social work students not only learn to operationalise social accountability by learning and implementing routine procedures, but also how to tie their reflections on practical experience to social work values and justice commitments. As social audit fieldwork takes place in rural community settings while being anchored in rural development departmental bureaucracy, this enables the students to interact with multiple actors who help them develop the capacity to understand and negotiate the challenges in empowering disadvantaged communities who are meant to hold powerful governing institutions to account for their actions and decisions.