Climate change poses significant threat to the wellbeing of global society. Addressing this change has as yet generated no fixed blueprint for social work practice and education. This paper reports on a formative evaluation of one Australian initiative to address this transformative opening in social work field education. Prompted by service users' and workers' experience of the impact of drought, a rurally located social work course team amended the field education curriculum to include a focus on Environment and Sustainability. This learning goal was added to the existing learning goals derived from the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) Practice Standards. Students and field supervisors were surveyed on their experience of meeting this new learning goal. While most expressed confidence in understanding the concepts involved, they clearly lacked assurance in interpreting these in practice encounters. Considering their qualitative input suggests that this topic is making a transition from being on the margins of social work to becoming mainstream. Their open-ended responses indicate that the incorporation of environmental sustainability into practice is at a threshold stage of development. Further enactment of eco-social work at the local level is concluded to be supported by using a transformative learning framework in facilitating critical reflection and collaborative dialogue for effective change.

My three children died of unrelated causes in 1971, 1983, and 2005. This thesis is an autoethnography in which I reclaim my identity as a mother, change my gaze to my children's lives rather than their deaths and explore how the culture of the last four decades influenced my experience. As I research my life, I seek answers from the academic literature to create meaning from my experience. At the core of this research are three stories about mothering each child within the culture in which they lived and died. Although the generalizability of my experiences is problematic, I hope that my writing resonates with the experience of readers.

Writing the stories of the lives of my three children who died of unrelated causes had unexpected consequences. I found myself released from exile. I had long felt banished from the world of mothering. This is an autoethnography on mothering Toni, my first-born child. She died in 1983 aged 13 years, 4 years after a diagnosis of leukaemia. The key to reclaiming my mother-love for Toni was to peel away the armour and expose my ambivalence about mothering. My ambivalence included the harrowing roller coaster ride of high anxiety, deep resentment and the pure ecstasy of mother love. My ambivalence, heightened by the years of Toni's illness, included my secret thoughts of wishing it was all over. Mortified by my 'bad' thoughts, I find my freedom by researching my and Toni's life and the motherhood literature to reach an acceptance of my past. I have a renewed sense of my mothering self.