The Education of Social Assistants in Portugal: Trends in Critical thinking

Abstract

Abstract:The purpose of this article is to highlight critical influences on professional education in the twenty-first century, in Portugal. It contextualizes social work by highlighting critical inheritances in the education of social workers. It then looks at critical trends in the current education of social workers. It finds that so-called Critical Social Work encompasses different and diverging trends, which are quite diluted in Portugal, expressed by a limited number of professors and individualized methods.

Radical Experiences of Portuguese Social Workers in the Vanguard of the 1974 Revolution

“…Social workers were not parted from this process, nor was Portuguese social work unaffected by the 1974-1976 Revolutionary spiral. A wide variety of sources points to the involvement of social workers in nearly all the fronts of revolutionary action (urban residents' movements, adult education programmes, labour unions' organisation, progressive housing programmes, direct democracy initiatives, organisation of cooperatives, workers' control, etc…), and to the impact of the Revolution in the academic curricula, in the supervision of internship practice, and in the theoretical as well as praexeological edifice of Portuguese social work (Fernandes, 1985;Negreiros, Andrade, & Queirós, 1992;Santos & Martins, 2016;Silva, 2016).…”