Building bridges between Europe and China to strengthen social work field education: preliminary findings from Guangdong Province

ABSTRACT Social work education has extended globally and has developed in China at an unprecedented speed. Serious attention must be paid to how the global spread of social work education interacts with developments in China. This study describes and assesses an international collaboration in field education between six European and Chinese universities using multiple data sources in Guangdong Province. Trust, disciplinary unity and local participation in the collaboration generated good practices in developing Chinese field education, including linking and preparing universities and agencies from developed and less developed areas, implementing a well-defined learning process with a competence-based perspective and training supervisors through training the trainers. Moreover, positive outcomes of this project were identified, including high satisfaction by both students and supervisors and increasing levels of supervisors’ self-efficacy and students’ competencies. In future, international collaboration should focus more on the issue of indigenisation.