Professional Education, Internships and Supervision: Persistent challenges and impasses

Abstract

Education in social service has been a constant object of concern and debate, and its contours have been determined by the historic conjunctures and the action of subjects guided by professional projects on distinct ethical and political planes. Thus, to consider professional education, especially internships and their supervision, involves recognizing the trajectory that allows conceiving these internships as a continuum between undergraduate studies, graduate work, permanent education, professional practice and political organization of social workers (ABEPSS, 2008). Historically, it can be observed that until the 1970s the dynamic of professional education was based on a symmetrical relationship between educational institutions and the fields of internships, with a focus on professional action and an emphasis on technical and instrumental aspects. In this dynamic there was a synergy between professors and field supervisors, in relation to the concept of the profession, the contents and practices that compose professional education and to needs for knowledge. It is not by chance that there have been many studies about supervision in social work in this period, revealing the intrinsic articulation between the hegemonic social project and the institutional projects incorporated by the professional category. This articulation, allied to social workers condition as the front line executors of social policies, had repercussions on the convergence between what students should learn to be able to exercise the profession and that which was practiced within institutions. In this context, internships were conducted in complete harmony among the actors involved, given that the objective was to execute what was learned. The education of social workers was shared between the educational institution and the institutions where internships were conducted, which were made responsible for teaching through practice. This design presupposed systematic supervision of social workers as an essential attribution for making professional education concrete. The synchronicity was strengthened by the systematic spaces of discussion, which reiterated the hegemonic professional and social project of the time, anchored in the technical and political competence of the supervisors and professors. This virtuous circle began to be broken as a consequence of three intrinsically related facts: the new form of considering the profession; the entrance of the majority of schools of social work into federal universities; and the recognition of social work as a field of knowledge by the national agencies that provide financial support to research and graduate studies. The new form of thinking of the profession, based on a critical-dialectical perspective, revealed the inseparability between the three dimensions that sustain it: theoretical-methodological, ethical-political and technical-operative. The adoption of a perspective of knowledge that would articulate the historic and theoreticalmethodological perspective became imperative, both for the devel...