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 beendetermined by the historic conjunctures and the action of subjects guided by professional projects on distinctethical 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 undergraduatestudies, 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 ona symmetrical relationship between educational institutions and the fields of internships, with a focus onprofessional action and an emphasis on technical and instrumental aspects. In this dynamic there was a synergybetween professors and field supervisors, in relation to the concept of the profession, the contents and practicesthat compose professional education and to needs for knowledge. It is not by chance that there have beenmany studies about supervision in social work in this period, revealing the intrinsic articulation between thehegemonic 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 theconvergence between what students should learn to be able to exercise the profession and that which waspracticed within institutions. In this context, internships were conducted in complete harmony among the actorsinvolved, given that the objective was to execute what was learned. The education of social workers wasshared between the educational institution and the institutions where internships were conducted, which weremade responsible for teaching through practice. This design presupposed systematic supervision of socialworkers as an essential attribution for making professional education concrete. The synchronicity wasstrengthened by the systematic spaces of discussion, which reiterated the hegemonic professional and socialproject 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 newform 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 financialsupport to research and graduate studies.The new form of thinking of the profession, based on a critical-dialectical perspective, revealed theinseparability between the three dimensions that sustain it: theoretical-methodological, ethical-political andtechnical-operative. The adoption of a perspective of knowledge that would articulate the historic and theoretical-methodological perspective became imperative, both for the development of the profession and for professionaleducation. Thus, an aspiration arose to educate professionals who understood their practice and understoodthemselves within the context of social life, and therefore, the relations of their practices with the totality of thehistoric process became a central issue (ABESS, 1989).The entrance of the majority of schools of social work - which until then had been maintained mostly byreligious or ganizations - into university structures took place in the 1970s, during the military dictatorship. At thistime, higher education policy reorganized the administrative and curricular structures of universities. This involvedthe incorporation of schools that supported the development project adopted by the country at the time. Anexample of this was the expansion of schools of law and administration, among others, as well as the inclusionin curriculums of disciplines such as The Study of Brazilian Problems, which sought to strengthen the ideologyof national security. The incorporation of the schools of social service imposed distinct parameters for theirrecognition in the academic realm, such as the demand for articulation of the tripod of education, research andextension, which had decisive impacts on the teaching career of social workers. Universities favored an