Enhancing communicative spaces for fieldwork education in an inland regional Australian university

Abstract

The diversity of fieldwork education models and practices ranges from mandatory to voluntary, from graded to ungraded, from paid to unpaid spectrums and they vary in length from less than a week to up to one year. Colleagues who work in the same university but in different schools, faculties or campuses are often so busy working within their discipline-specific arena that there seems to be little opportunity to learn from and collaborate with other disciplines about fieldwork education programs. This paper provides a report on a project that trialled and evaluated an online debate with university staff about fieldwork education issues. The aims were to establish a sustainable university-wide fieldwork education discourse, to break down profession-specific silos, to inform the development of university-wide fieldwork education benchmarks and to foster fieldwork education leadership through online debates. The findings demonstrate that, collectively, participants shared a wealth of experience and wisdom that remained largely untapped at a university-wide level. Participants' evaluation highlighted the perceived value of creating a communicative space for a fieldwork education discourse and it exposed aspects of the online environment and time constraints as its biggest barrier. © 2010 HERDSA.