Unveiling the Dynamic Social Work Education Landscape in Albania

Abstract

Social work has little tradition as an academic or professional path in most post-communist countries. The need for well-trained social workers is grave in all of these societies, with Albania being no exception. The aim of this paper is to review the current plans of study of the major three departments of social work in Albania using as benchmarks the Global Standards of Quality of Social Work Education and the Albanian Credit Framework. For the purposes of this paper a content analysis of the curriculum and the detailed syllabi was employed. This analysis revealed the following themes: (1) the nature of the curriculum in relation to global social work education quality standards (2) possible bottlenecks of the three curricula related to the Albanian Credit Framework and (3) compatibility level among the three curricula in the framework of the Bologna process. Results showed a satisfying level of adaptation of social work curricula with Global Standards of Quality of Social Work Education, with a reasonable division among theoretical courses of different orientations in the core theoretical curriculum. However, field practice hours were much less than the required ones, but the current Albanian Credit Framework created a bottleneck in relation to it, because it sets limits and hampers the universities in adapting and implementing the international best practices of 170-200 field placement days. It is suggested to systematically benchmark all three curricula to the Global Standards of Quality of Social Work Education and to create space for the field practice for professions like social work.