Ways of Seeing: On Knowledge, Practice, and Professional Vision in Students of Social Work

The profession of social work has long been troubled by a relative lack of a stable knowledge base. In light of this, much has been written on the relationship between knowledge and practice and how this "gap" informs notions of expertise in social work. In an ethnography of social work students and in dialogue with both the social work literature on expertise and the anthropology of professions, this paper investigates and gestures toward a characterization of professional vision (Goodwin 1994) among social work students. The paper's findings indicate that the study's participants understood themselves to be deploying "common sense" in their field placements rather than formalized knowledge in the form of science or theory. Their statements reflect longstanding conceptual and ethical commitments in social work, such as systems thinking and sensitivity to suffering's complexity, while also pointing to a divergence from more recent trends in the field, such as the move toward evidence-based practice. The paper introduces professional vision as an important analytic for studying social work and contributes to a clarification of the nature of social work expertise.