Coloniality and professional training in Social Work: notes of its transversality in the consubstantialization of the training project
Coloniality; Decoloniality; Social Work; Professional qualification; Curriculum Guidelines.
The project of professional training in Social Work, embodied in the 1990s from the implementation of the Curricular Guidelines of ABEPSS - Brazilian Association of Teaching and Research in Social Work - over the years provided the maturation of the historical-dialectical materialist perspective in the profession. This, in turn, made possible the deepening of the capacity of reading the social reality by the professionals, opening space for the unveiling of the Brazilian socio-historical particularities and the apprehension of these as determinants for the professional project. In this vein, in the light of the Marxist critical method, it is proposed to analyze the transversality of decolonial studies and coloniality in the project of professional training in Social Work, establishing as a general objective “to analyze the existing interface between professional training and coloniality expressed in the Brazilian reality, in order to reveal its traits in the curricular components of professional academic training in Social Work, in the oldest courses in each region of Brazil”. This is an exploratory research with a mixed approach, whose methodological procedures were: bibliographic review - which allowed contact and deepening with the themes that involve the object of study; documental research - carried out from the analysis of the Pedagogical Course Projects of the oldest course of Social Work in the geographic regions of the country; and the content analysis, carried out from the exploration of the material guided by a script of document analysis and, later, from the critical-reflexive inferences generated by the data obtained associated with the investigations carried out. The study evidences the incipient presence of the decolonial debate and the teaching of coloniality in the courses observed, however it demonstrates the existing transversality between decoloniality, coloniality and Social Work in Brazilian society, which only gain apprehension from the perspective/logic of the Fundamentals and their foundational cores. The absorption of this debate by the professional training project reaffirms not only the coherence and social direction of the professional project, but also contributes to the advance towards its consubstantialization.