Too close for comfort: Intergenerational blame and disillusionment in social work supervision in the West Bank, Palestine

Palestinian social work is taking form in the West Bank in the context of Israel's increasingly violent and restrictive multigenerational occupation, with limited relevant theory and research to guide practice. Social work students in Palestine, as elsewhere, learn to practice under the supervision of experienced social workers in clinics, hospitals, schools, and other agencies. Supervision becomes a key setting for the hidden curriculum—teaching and learning that is not officially recognized. We aimed to study training supervision in Palestine as a window on the moral organizing of the profession. Using modified grounded theory methods, we interviewed and followed 99 supervisors and 14 undergraduate students over a two-year period in 12 West Bank cities. Our analysis reveals an intergenerational clash of values between supervisors and students. Unable to adequately respond to the acuity of need, supervisors and students blame each other for feelings of helplessness and complacency in the normalization of the occupation. Learning to work with each other, in spite of and through disappointment, is central to their training. This relationship can also provide a foundation for creative clinical activism. The curriculum is not just unspoken, but actively kept hidden, as students learn both implicitly and explicitly to protect their feelings and the details of their work as a means of forbearance and agency in the setting of precarity and disillusionment. The hidden curriculum, or the curriculum in hiding, operates as an affectively charged site of moral contestation, central to the emergence of the profession under prolonged occupation.