The focus of this article is how can people's religious practice be a resource in international social work? The question will be discussed in relation to pre-modern, modern and postmodern societies. The article will contain a description of religious activity in two different cases and related to international social work. The article concludes that from a postmodern view, international social work will profit from opening up and seeing religion as a contextual factor. What needs to be discussed further is whether a reason for the relative absence of religion and religious practice in international social work textbooks might be the lack of distinction between acknowledgement and acceptance of religion.

Our concern in this article is how to transform learning experiences in international field placement into sustainable social work knowledge for future practice. International field placement provides unique experiences that contribute to contextual understanding of social work and prepare students for practice in a multicultural setting. We have used focus group interviews and seen international experiences in light of domestic ones. In analysing the knowledge transformation process of the learning experiences, we use experiential learning theories. We conclude that students’ learning process from experience to theory and from theoretical knowledge to practice would benefit from following a transformation of knowledge cycle through the study programme.

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