ABSTRACT
Social work education is expansive to address emerging social issues, and fieldwork provides the testing ground for knowledge and skill building in social work students. The basic structure of social work education has not radically changed since its inception in 1936 in India. The changes that influence the profession are diverse. They range from contrasting ideological perspectives between the fieldwork placement agency or organisation and the educational institution, alternate problem solving mechanisms and addressing and resolving systems and cultural norms that actually require thinking out of the box and which are antithetical to social work values. Fieldwork supervision receives very low priority as many universities tend to apply the same criteria for the social work programme as they do for the social sciences. The supervisory challenges and coordination across the spectrum also appear to be very similar. The ideological differences coupled with the generational differences may influence the supervisory relationship.
