Postgraduate
training in Social Work in the pandemic context:
challenges
of Emergency Remote Teaching
Formação pós-graduada em Serviço Social no
contexto pandêmico:
desafios do Ensino Remoto Emergencial
Maria Liduina de Oliveira e SILVA*
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7904-4836
Rafaela Bezerra FERNANDES**
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8768-0499
Tales Willyan Fornazier MOREIRA***
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9191-7820
Abstract: This article deals with the
postgraduate training process in Social Work in Brazil in the context of
Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT), in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, whose
scenario was a catalyst for the counter-reforms of education in the country
that, under the aegis of the neoliberalism, finds in the Bolsonaro government
the stage that sharpens and exposes the lack of commitment to public education.
The reflections presented here, based on bibliographic research and data
analysis, are derived from the information obtained through the mappings (2021
and 2022) of the impacts of the ERT in the area of Social Work, carried out by the Association for Teaching and Brazilian
Research in Social Work (Brazilian Association for Teaching and Research in
Social Work —ABEPSS).
The data make evident the challenges experienced in this context of exceptionality
in the face of adherence to the ERT and point out the elements that need to be
faced in the present time so that the damages of this teaching method do not
remain as a deleterious legacy in the critical training process of the
profession.
Keywords:
Social Work. Postgraduate studies. Emergency Remote Teaching.
Pandemic.
Resumo: Este artigo trata do
processo de formação pós-graduada em Serviço Social no Brasil em contexto do
Ensino Remoto Emergencial (ERE), face à pandemia da covid-19, cujo cenário foi
um catalisador das contrarreformas da educação no país que, sob a égide do neoliberalismo,
encontra no governo Bolsonaro o palco que agudiza e escancara o descompromisso
com o ensino público. As reflexões aqui apresentadas, a partir de pesquisa
bibliográfica e análise de dados, são oriundas das informações obtidas através
dos mapeamentos (2021 e 2022) dos impactos do ERE na área de Serviço Social,
realizados pela Associação Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em Serviço Social
(ABEPSS). Os dados evidenciam os desafios vivenciados nesse contexto de
excepcionalidade frente a adesão do ERE e apontam os elementos que demandam
enfrentamento no tempo presente para que os prejuízos dessa modalidade de
ensino não permaneçam como herança deletéria no processo formativo crítico da
profissão.
Palavras-chave: Serviço Social. Pós-graduação. Ensino Remoto Emergencial. Pandemia.
Submitted on: 9/11/2022. Revised on: 19/1/2023. Accepted on: 17/2/2023.
Introduction
|
T |
he themes related to the pandemic, remote/on-site education and
postgraduate training in Social Work invoke the scenario in which we find
ourselves in Brazil, the capitalist crisis, the social, political and health
crisis, marked by an unprecedented social regression which has been taking
place at least since 2015/2016 and is deepened by the global geopolitical
scenario.
In relation to the covid-19 pandemic, more than 6.59 million deaths have
already been recorded in the world. In Brazil, by September 2022, the Ministry
of Health had counted 686.000 deaths, among which we highlight the deaths of
social workers during their professional practice, recorded in the Memorial
“Our grief, our struggle” (CFESS; ABEPSS, s/d), organized by the Federal
Council of Social Work and by the Brazilian Association of Teaching and
Research in Social Work.
In addition to the pandemic, the imperialist war between Russia and
Ukraine and the global expansion of poverty, mediated by national and
international political setbacks, determined the resurgence of social inequalities,
as revealed by the Oxfam-Brasil Report (2022),
released on 23 May 2022 during the Davos capitalist conclave.
In this context, we experience a structural crisis of capital that grows
in its ultra-neoliberal, ultraconservative and predatory character, in which
rights are lost and the lack of protections looms large, with the threats to
life remaining, represented by the coronavirus, which only opened wide the
shameful abyss of the Brazilian society, further explaining the contradictions
of a capitalism in the process of productive restructuring and subject to the
logic of finance.
In reality, the
country was already experiencing an escalation of its deepest contradictions
resulting from the crisis of capital aggravated by the advance to the extreme
right in the political sphere, whose most eminent objectification was the
election of Jair Messias Bolsonaro to the federal government in 2018. Although
the advance of extreme right-wing neo-fascist groups is a worldwide phenomenon,
it is worth analyzing the Brazilian particularities that support the so-called
neoconservatism and how this is mixed with a process of radicalization of
neoliberalism in the economic sphere.
Mészaros
(2002) had explained that contemporary capitalism is globalizing and its socio metabolism
highlights the most barbaric forms of production and social reproduction, so
well evidenced in this context of capital crisis and associated with the
covid-19 pandemic, when the intensification of work stands out deepened with
the overexploitation in capitalism, intensifying the expressions of the social
question, ethnic-racial and gender /sexuality inequalities , with the growth of
unemployment, of informalization, the precariousness of work and regressive
measures of rights.
In early 2020, the pandemic found the country amid a deep crisis, moving
towards a return to the hunger map, with frozen public budget and,
consequently, more precariousness of social policies and privatization of
services, with the approval of a reform of Social Security that annihilates
labor rights. The denial of the disease by the federal government was part of a
strategy whose explicit purpose was the genocide of the most impoverished ones.[1]
Discussing the pandemic regarding the relationship between education and
graduate training in Social Work reveals the perverse logic of the government
that reproduces the interests of capital, the precariousness of training and
the teaching work conditions, and reveals how it remains strengthened, while
suffering and helplessness increase in the face of lack of protection.
Aiming to problematize, therefore, this situation and postgraduate
training in Social Work in Brazil, which is sorely crossed by this logic of
dismantling, this essay presents reflections and data analysis from two large
mappings held by ABEPSS, in 2021 and 2022, whose objectives were to build an
overview of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) in the scope of postgraduate
studies, as well as to follow up and monitor the impacts of this modality along
with postgraduate programs in the area, pointing out the challenges present in
the current historical period, which demand a collective confrontation of the
entire category that believes and defends the critical project of the
profession, so that the damage and threats of the present time do not remain as
a deleterious legacy to the entire historical construction around the direction
of the professional Ethical-Political Project.
The Bolsonaro government and the setbacks in education policy
Starting from the presupposition
of the centrality of work as a founding element of sociability and with a
contribution to the understanding of postgraduate studies as a strategic space
that fulfills the task of qualifying for work, this article is part of the
critical debate about this theme anchored in the present Brazilian reality ,
marked by a scenario of profound neglect, dismantling and misinformation, whose
corollaries, not by chance, directly affect the education policy.
In the wake of successive
changes in the position of Minister of Education, along the four years of the
Bolsonaro government, with names involved in scandals ranging from one
investigated by the Supreme Court who fled to the US, to another arrested by
the Federal Police for corruption and influence peddling in the well-known Bolsolão do MEC [2],
the education portfolio proved to be, without a doubt, largely distant from the
center of the governmental priorities of those who were in charge of the
country.
In this sense, when
thinking about the education agenda under the aforementioned
government, it is important to recognize that it is aimed at its own
destruction, a fact that is present not only in an express speech,[3]
but likewise in concrete data, whose successive cuts in resources corroborate
the unsustainability of public policy itself. As punctuated by Mattos (2020, p.
213), “[…] the obscurantist attitude towards education and science had
materially concrete repercussions, with the intensification of budget cuts to
higher education institutions and agencies that support scientific production
and post-graduate programs".
This deliberate
dismantling impacts since basic to higher education, whose setbacks are
evidenced, for example, by the bill that amends the Law Guidelines and Basis of
the National Education and the Child and Adolescent Statute, instituting homeschooling (Brasil, 2022b), [4]a
profoundly exclusionary proposal that denies basic rights to children and
adolescents, such as fundamental socialization and contact with the plurality
of ideas; as well as by the Future-se proposal which, given the budgetary
bottlenecks for higher education, was presented as a way out of the spurious
framework created by the government itself, with the aim “[…] that institutions
[were] re-functionalized as service organizations so that they can start its
self-financing, releasing the federal State from funding the public
institutions under its responsibility” (Leher, 2019, p. 31).
This whole chaotic picture
also advances and finds an echo in funding agencies, such as CAPES and CNPq, which are facing an acute disruption as a Brazilian
heritage, either due to the lack of allocation of resources that make their
full operation possible, with the purpose they bear, or because of the
discontinuation of work and the wide turnover in the federal executive branch
that also plagues them. Having a President of the Republic who goes public and
says that students at Brazilian universities “[…] do everything but study […]”
(cf. Aluno...,
2019) categorically confirms the understanding that the Head of State has
about the relevance and place of the production of knowledge in that country
and, consequently, the attention they devote to the demands linked to it.
It is, therefore, a
political-institutional project of dismantling Brazilian public education,
which reveals the forces that operate at the core of national politics based on
negationism and anti-scientificism. The setbacks are
countless, aimed at weakening and/or delegitimizing
the university space as a producer of knowledge and a diffuser of critical
thinking. In this sense, the deleterious effects of this
regrettable mismanagement are felt in the overthrow of rights hardly won by the
working class.
In this list, it is worth
mentioning the implementation of Reuni Digital[5],
a
program already on going,[6]
aimed at expanding distance education in Public Federal Universities which,
under the argument of expanding access to higher education and achieving the goals of the National
Education Plan, directly addresses against the inseparability between teaching,
research and extension, as well as it exacerbates the precariousness of teaching,
in addition to directly oppose the university perspective that we have historically
defended, largely distant from the marketing logic imposed by the
aforementioned pilot program.
It is important to highlight that, at the end of
the Bolsonaro government, CAPES’s Ordinance No. 315 was approved on December
30, 2022, published on the Federal Official Gazette on January 02, 2023, which
authorizes the hybrid process of teaching and learning by stricto sensu graduate programs in Brazil (Brasil, 2023). It is a concept of education as a branch from
the ERT, which makes the hybrid modality of training official, in search of new
paths for the flexible reorganization of postgraduate teaching.
In a context of ERT, hybrid learning,
scholarships cuts, contraction of student permanence policies and freezing of
investments in education policy, it seems evident to us the intention of not
only to confront the quality socially associated with public universities, but
also, making use of this remaining recognition, to guarantee, through low
funding, the massification of certifications and the creation of a margin to
allow private capital to largely enter this structure.
In addition to the above,
there is also, in progress, the bill 206/2019 (Brasil,
2019), authored by federal representative General Peternelli
(União Brasil-SP), which,
by confronting the gratuity of education, the outcome of hard and massive
historical mobilizations, proposes the collection of monthly fees from students
at public universities, in order to generate funds for
their own costs.
The sociopolitical drama we are experiencing
also extends to other spheres within the scope of education, whose Quota Law is
a categorical example. Sanctioned in August 2012, it should, after 10 years,
have been revised, which did not occur during the course of the Bolsonaro
government, whose president, already in 2018, expressed his understanding regarding
the affirmative actions as a “[…] misguided […]” policy and “[…] victimhood […]”
(Bolsonaro
[...], 2018, not paginated), which shows his lack of
commitment and lack of seriousness in the face of a theme that is perennially
dear to us in Brazilian socio-historical formation: racism (and the need to
confront it) as a structural element of social relations established here.
The problem presented here
takes on even more perverse contours when associated with the chronic lack of
funding for education policies, which fulfills the task of increasing the
already limited survival conditions of Brazilian public universities, which remain
under dramatic conditions. The 2022 budget[7]
highlights this scenario whose cuts, small in relation to the Ministry of
Economy (veto of only R$ 85.9 thousand), are largely expressive when referring to the Ministry of Education, a
department that suffered a cut of R$ 739, 8 million (Motoryn, 2022), being, therefore, the second most affected
area, behind only the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, which suffered a
cut of 1 billion reais. Regarding the promotion of undergraduate, graduate, teaching,
research and extension actions, it is important to
highlight the loss of R$ 4.2 million.
With a budget forecast already compromised,
the course of 2022 brought new aggravating factors to the scene, when the
federal government determined, in May, the cut of BRL 3.23 billion from MEC’s
budget, of which BRL 1 billion directly affects the institutes and federal
universities — a fact that mobilized the academic community and university
leaders around the agenda taken up for debate in a public hearing, held on June
15, 2022, at the Education Commission of the House of Representatives (ANDES,
2022). A new attack[8]
on education came under the spotlight in October of the same year, in the form
of a blockade of over R$2.4 billion by the Ministry of Education, a measure
that took students to the streets and moved social networks against the cuts in
education, aimed at the suffocation of Brazilian higher education, and resulted
in a retreat by the federal government.
It is on
this torn ground, of regression and attack on education and social rights, that
Social Working faced the developments and challenges arising from Emergency
Remote Teaching[9],
established in the country as a temporary alternative, therefore exceptional,
due to the pandemic context, focused on the preservation of lives.
Impacts of the pandemic on postgraduate studies in the area of Social Work
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, ABEPSS has
firmly positioned itself against the processes of precarious training, within
the scope of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, in defense of the quality
of training and democracy in institutions that promote research, thus placing
itself contrary to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERE), since this is placed as yet
another onslaught of capital, in the midst of education counter-reform
processes, which attempt to cause precariousness, reduction, and privatize
education training. As Farage (2021) points out:
Emergency remote
teaching must be understood as one of the elements of the ongoing education
counter-reform process in Brazil and throughout Latin America. Not only because
it drives a new model of education, which cannot even be considered distance
education, as regulated in Decree No. 9.057, May 25, 2017, but also because it
is the outcome of a teaching work modality suitable to the process of
productive restructure and precariousness of the working sphere that empties
the sense of professional work of university professors
(Farage, 2021, p. 55).*
In this sense, it is essential to understand the ERT as one of the
pillars of the counter-reform of education underway in Brazil and in Latin
American countries, and, above all, to understand the nefarious damages of this
modality to the training project built by the Brazilian Social Work in recent
decades. It is worth mentioning that the management “We breathe struggle here!”
(2021 - 2022), released several notes and positions contrary to the ERT, and
ABEPSS began facing the tensions and challenges of this modality, pointing out
political-academic guidelines for the courses and programs in the area, aiming
to preserve the social direction of the training project defended by the
entity.
Considering
this scenario, the aforementioned management listed as
a priority action in its national planning the need to continue and deepen
research on the ERT Mapping, started in the previous management, referring to
the implementation and evaluation of Emergency Remote Teaching in undergraduate
and postgraduate courses, scoring data referring to the pandemic, the profile
of the post-graduation programs, the damages to training and the
problematizations present in this debate.
In the meantime, the management of ABEPSS “We breathe
struggle here!” carried out two mappings on the ERT, and, within the scope of postgraduate
studies, the first[10], carried
out in 2021, was intended to establish a general overview of the ERT in the
area of Social Work, and the second one[11],
carried out in 2022, aimed to continue with the previous mapping, in order to
accompany, monitor and apprehend the challenges posed to face-to-face and/or
hybrid return in this new context, given the need to understand the reality of
postgraduate programs in the area of Social Work to support actions and entity
positioning.
It is essential to highlight that, during these mappings, ABEPSS
mobilized dozens of undergraduate courses in Social Work, from all regions of
the country, and that, in the scope of graduate studies, the first survey had
the participation of all 36 programs (postgraduation) in the area, while 35
participated in the second one. With regard to
methodology, both surveys were carried out via a questionnaire on Google Forms, based on a form consisting
of open and closed questions, which was sent by e-mail to the coordinators of
the 36 post-graduation programs in the Area.
For the reflections in this text, we list below some axes with the main
data obtained in the 2021 and 2022 mappings, namely:
Access and permanence
in postgraduate studies during the COVID-19 pandemic
The issue of access and permanence in graduate school during the period
of the new coronavirus pandemic also includes admission, adherence and
challenges experienced by students in the context of the ERT, as well as the
situation of scholarships. This is a crucial debate that deserves our
attention. The data collected in the first survey (2021) showed that, given
this reality, post-graduation programs needed to build new strategies to enable
the entry of new students in this challenging situation.
Such data indicated that 33 (91.7%) programs maintained the selection
processes and carried them out remotely. In this scenario of exceptionality, it
was also possible to observe an increase in the search for vacancies in the post-graduation
programs, once 10 (27.8%) programs highlighted that there was an increase in
the search for admission to the graduate program. As indicated by ABEPSS
(2021), this data calls us to reflection in order to
decipher what this reality has to tell us, that is, we need to understand why,
during the pandemic context, in which post-graduation programs carried out
selection processes mostly online, there was a significant increase in demand
for postgraduate studies in the area.
It is important that we do not disconnect this analysis from the set of
counter-reforms of the State in the educational field, from the impositions of
international organizations that bet on the mediation of technology as a way of
accessing higher education, as Farage (2021) warns, since it is essential to
understand the ERT as one of the pillars of the counter-reform of education in
progress, in Brazil and in the countries of Latin America, and, above all, we
understand the unfortunate damage that this modality has for the training
project built by the Brazilian Social Work in recent decades, as already
mentioned.
It is also necessary that we carry out a concrete analysis of the
concrete situation, as the Leninist maxim teaches us, in
order to apprehend the objective conditions that cross these subjects
who sought to enter graduate school in this period of exceptionality. Thus, we
agree that:
[…] this analysis
must obviously take into consideration the concrete condition of class and,
consequently, the material and objective limitations not only of permanence in
graduate school, but also of admission. That is, what we draw attention to regards
the profile of students who are increasingly reaching postgraduate courses (Associação Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em
Serviço Social,
2021, p. 64).
We highlight, therefore, the research on the profile of graduate
students (Ferreira et al., [2018]), carried out by ABEPSS during the 2017-2018 biennium, which reveals
that graduate students in the area of Social Work are mostly women (83%), among
them brown-skinned (32.5%), black or quilombola
(19.4%) and indigenous (0.2%), 1/3 with family income of up to 3 minimum wages
and the majority (69%) need to carry out some work activity during graduate
school to supplement their income. For this reason, we cannot lose sight of the
profile of students who are increasingly joining postgraduate courses in the
area, since their objective condition is linked not only to the real and
concrete possibilities for entry, as it directly impacts student permanence in
graduate school.
It is crucial to emphasize that, in the context of the pandemic and accession
to the ERT, the biggest challenges identified during this period relate to the
lack of equipment, infrastructure and internet access, as well as the fact that
a portion of students residing in rural areas and/or attending classes on their
cell phones, as they need to share the only computer with other people in the
family, whose reality significantly impaired student participation in remote
teaching activities, as evidenced by the ABEPSS survey (2021).
Additionally, the second survey also pointed out that, in this pandemic
period, more than half of the programs, 20, identified a significant increase
in enrollment withdrawals, the highest incidence of which occurred in federal
public institutions, especially in the year 2020, in the rising period of the COVID-19
pandemic in Brazil. The data also showed that 13 (37.1%) post-graduation
programs observed high dropout rates in the last period, thus constituting an
important agenda for problematization and confrontation (Brazilian Association of Teaching and Research on Social Work, 2022b).
Concerning the context of scholarships, the first survey (2021) showed
that 12 (33.3%) programs had cuts in supply and 1 PPG indicated that it had
lost all scholarships due to the cut in resources in 2020 — a reality that
reflects the set of counter-reforms and dismantling of Brazilian education,
exacerbated in the Bolsonaro government, such as Ordinance No. 1,122, of 2020 (Brasil, 2020a),
of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications which
prioritizes investments in technological areas to the detriment of the area of
Human Sciences; as well as CAPES’ Ordinance nº 34/2020 (Brasil, 2020b), which
prioritizes the release of scholarships for programs with higher grades,
relegating support to programs with lower grades, which obviously weakens and undermines
the conditions for sustaining new programs and/or regions that historically
have experienced challenges to maintain themselves (Brazilian
Association of Teaching and Research on Social Work, 2022b).
This scenario of intense challenges has also exposed the absence and/or
fragility of policies for permanence and student assistance in the field of
postgraduate studies, which is a struggle that urgently needs to be waged by
the group of entities and collective subjects that are committed to Brazilian
postgraduate studies. The ABEPSS survey (2022b) pointed out that 19 (54.5%) post-graduation programs mentioned offering
internet; 12 (34.2%) electronic devices; 8 (22.8%) food; 5 (14.2%), housing and
only 1 (0.2%), day care. On the other hand, 11 (31.4%) post-graduation programs
do not offer any type of assistance to graduate students.
The data show a
precarious situation of actions and initiatives for student assistance,
particularly regarding basic services that greatly contribute to the
democratization of access to higher education and specifically to postgraduate
studies. If we think that 11 (31.4%) do not offer any type of assistance and
that 27 (77.1%) of the surveyed institutions do not offer food, we understand
that student assistance is characterized by precariousness and faces major
challenges for student permanence (Associação
Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em Serviço Social, 2022b, p. 58).
Thus, this reality calls us to the fight for the construction of
assistance policies and student permanence in graduate school, which must be in
the order of the day, linked to the historical struggles for the defense of
racial quotas in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, the expansion of the
number of scholarships offered and also the readjustment of the value,
considering that in March 2023 will complete 10 years without readjustment,
with the current value of the master's and doctoral scholarships being too outdated
and insufficient to meet the minimum needs of permanence in the postgraduate
studies, according to the analysis of the National Association of Graduate
Students (ANPG)[12] and the
president of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC).[13]
ERT losses for postgraduate training in Social Work
Regarding the losses of the ERT for training, both at the undergraduate
and graduate levels, both surveys carried out by ABEPSS (2021 and 2022) show
how disastrous this modality is for the training project hegemonically defended
by the Service Social renewed. Therefore, we agree that:
[…] it is
precisely this “laboratory of experimentation”, which is becoming the ERT,
which must be questioned by all who consider public education a heritage
conquered by the working class and defend that it be free, secular, of quality,
anti-patriarchal, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, anti-LGBTphobic
and universal. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the elements of the ERT
and the threats posed by the administrative counter-reform for public higher
education and its impacts on the professional training of Social Work (Farage,
2021, p. 55).
In the first survey, 34 (94.4%) programs reported that the ERT brought
harm to the training of researchers in the area, pointing out that “[…] this
perception concerns, especially, the impediment, given the current situation,
of carrying out the face-to-face research with the need to resize and/or
interrupt ongoing field research” (Associação Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em Serviço Social, 2021, p. 77).
These data were confirmed in the following survey (2022), in which 34 of
the 35 PPG respondents reaffirmed that this exceptional modality of teaching
caused damage to the training project defended by ABEPSS, with 31 (93.9%)
programs indicating that they carried out or will carry out actions and
activities to minimize such effects.
Immersed in a
context of severe dismantling with profound and direct implications for workers,
such data only confirm how necessary and urgent it is to defend a face-to-face
training project, anchored in criticality, aimed at the dimension of collective
life in society and the rigor of the ethical-political principles that sustain
the Social Work profession and its area of knowledge. Indispensable defense,
especially in this context where the damage to training, already existing in
previous contexts, is deepened either by the pandemic or by the logic of
full-throttle setbacks by the Bolsonaro government (Associação
Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em Serviço Social, 2022, p. 60).
A fact that deserves reflection is that, during these almost two years
of ERT, we will have a generation of graduate students, at least at the
master's level, trained exclusively in this modality. Furthermore, in 2021, 14
(38.9%) post-graduation programs indicated that the ERT widened the distance
between undergraduate and graduate courses — which is an affront to the
training project defended by ABEPSS, which values the inseparability between
undergraduate and graduate courses —, given the existence of different
calendars and the difficulty of reconciling the dynamics of remote activities.
The teaching internship was also hampered in this context, since 15
(41.7%) post-graduation programs stated that they had not carried out the
activity in 2021, and the 21 (58.3%) who maintained their performance, did it
completely remotely, from the preparation and planning of the discipline to the
execution and evaluation of activities (Associação Brasileira de Ensino e
Pesquisa em Serviço Social, 2021).
In addition, the dynamics of the research groups/nuclei were also
impacted, making it necessary to create other strategies in this process. The
first survey showed that in 15 (41.7%) post-graduation programs a joint
position was decided to maintain activities in the remote modality; another 15
(41.7%) indicated that the decision to maintain or suspend activities was up to
each professor; and, among the other responses, a broad recommendation for the
maintenance of activities by research centers/groups was pointed out as a trend
(Associação
Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em Serviço Social, 2021). In the most recent survey (2022), a tendency was observed for carrying
out activities of the groups/research centers in a hybrid way.
It is important to emphasize that the second survey (2022) also showed
that, of the 35 post-graduation programs, 28 (80%) were already carrying out
face-to-face activities, 12 (34.3%) in the hybrid mode and 7 (20%) were still
in remote mode. [14]It is
noteworthy that, at the same time that some post-graduation programs still maintained discipline activities remotely, as they
are in the process of transitioning to face-to-face attendance, the hybrid
modality still shows itself as a growing trend, as a result of the experiment
of remote activities during the validity period of the ERT (Associação
Brasileira de Ensino e Pesquisa em Serviço Social, 2022b).
Faced with this radically adverse
context, which frontally attacks public education, post-graduation and the
training project defended by ABEPSS, it is imperative that we do not lose sight
of the legacy built historically by the profession, as well as the need to
place ourselves uncompromisingly in the trenches of struggle for its
strengthening. Even because,
[...] in view of
the objective conditions given by the development of research and postgraduate
studies and under the influence of the Professional Ethical-Political Project,
Social Work expanded its intellectual function, building a critical mass of
knowledge, dependent on the formation of a culture that opposes the dominant
hegemony, played by the Marxist left in Brazil, and does so without losing the
unity of the relationship with professional practice, but exposing a
distinction between the meaning of Social Work as an area of knowledge and a
profession focused on intervention direct in reality (Mota, 2013, p. 24).
In this way, the paths trodden by the professional category in recent
decades, as well as the theoretical and ethical-political choices in this
process, attested to the profession not only the commitment to human emancipation
and the construction of a radically free sociability, but a maturity and
academic legitimacy, based on the solidification of an important critical
intellectual collection in the field of social sciences, not limited only to an
intervening profession, but to an important area of knowledge production, which
opposes the dominant ideology, as evidenced by Mota (2013).
Mental health and teaching work conditions
Regarding the mental and/or physical health condition of students and
teachers in this ERT process, the first survey (2021) showed that 35 (97.2%) post-graduation
programs identified illness processes among students and/or teachers during the
new coronavirus pandemic and, in the second (2022), 14 (40%) post-graduation
programs pointed to a process of physical and/or mental illness of students,
while 33 (94.3%) programs had teachers affected by COVID-19. This reality
cannot be understood apart from the process of deepening the structural crisis
of capital, the precariousness and intensification of work, as well as the
degradation and trivialization of life, especially in this pandemic context (Brazilian Association of Teaching and Research on Social Work, 2022b).
Still in this area, the second survey also showed that 22 (62.8%) of the
35 respondent programs signaled lack of motivation on the part of the
postgraduate student body, related to conditions in the home environment,
mental and physical health issues and challenges
access to technologies. Another equally important situation, pointed out by 15
(42.8%) post-graduation programs, is in relation to the freezing of
scholarships and, therefore, the challenges of staying in graduate school (Brazilian Association of Teaching and Research on Social Work, 2022).
It is important to mention that the answers also indicated the
difficulty of reconciling work, academic, family and
domestic life - which reaffirms that the challenges for entering and remaining
students in the scope of the graduate program in Social Work are fundamentally
related to the concrete conditions of class, gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality
and territory, considering the profile of these students, as previously
mentioned.
The 2022 survey also presented data on the context of teaching work,
which deserves attention, since 34 (97.2%) post-graduation programs showed a
profound process of intensification of teaching work in this pandemic scenario,
a fact that denotes not only an intrinsic characteristic to the capitalist mode
of production, but especially the possibility of its aggravation through remote
teaching (Brazilian Association of Teaching and Research on
Social Work, 2022). Therefore, we understand that:
[…] postgraduate
training has been directly affected in the context of the capital crisis
associated with economic, social, political, health crises and the denial of
science that devastates scientific-academic relations in teaching-learning
methodologies (use of technologies), research, production of knowledge and
others that produced significant impacts on the formation and management of Graduate
Programs in Social Work (Brazilian Association of Teaching and
Research on Social Work, 2021, p. 80).
This disastrous scenario leaves us with no choice but to resist
collectively in the fight against all the precariousness of education and training
in Social Work, reaffirming the historical defense of professional entities for
an education that is public, free, secular, critical, quality, socially
referenced and committed to emancipatory values. It is in this trench that, as a
guardian of the training project hegemonically defended by the category, ABEPSS
places itself!
Final
considerations
Based on the data from the last Census of Higher Education by the
National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (2022),
in the period from 2011 to 2020, there was a colossal growth in distance
learning courses, which in a short period of time assumed the following
percentages: technological (863.3%), bachelor's degree (829.1%) and teaching degree
(170.5%). Of the 19,626,441 vacancies offered in 2020, 68.9% were in the
distance modality and only 31.1% in the face-to-face, a fact that leads us to
another data: 95.6% of this total of vacancies were offered by private
institutions, while only 4.4% were offered by public institutions.
The
synthesis of this information brings us to the center of the reflection
proposed here: if distance learning in undergraduate education reached titanic
proportions over the course of 10 years, bringing with it a profound
precariousness in Brazilian higher education, the ERT, both in undergraduate
and graduate courses, due to its time, must be seen in the character of
exceptionality that belongs to it, aiming not to become yet another endorsement
of the perspective of, in the name of democratizing access to education, acting
in the direction of training reduction, the commodification of education, the
precariousness of work and the scrapping of higher education — given that it is
an instrument that reinforces the country's social,
regional, ethnic-racial and gender inequalities, while reserving fragile and
accelerated training for the most impoverished segments.
In the carried-out
mappings, a decline in the quality of postgraduate training was
identified and the losses caused by training in the ERT modality that have
affected postgraduate programs in Social Work. Although the return to
face-to-face teaching is mostly observed, we are concerned about the
hybridization trend in postgraduate studies, in the sense that the exceptional
moment of the ERT and the toning of the hybrid modality, may become perennial
and endorse the privatist and market perspective
starting from the mixture of teaching activities, research, defense of
dissertations and theses, study groups/centers and others with the use of digital
resources via information and communication technologies (ICTs) to complete the
workload of pedagogical activities .
Apart from that, considering Ordinance No. 315/2022 of CAPES (Brasil, 2023), recently published, which makes
official and provides guidelines for blended teaching for postgraduate
students, we are concerned with structuring this modality to strengthen the
distance learning, at the same time that the digital educational apparatus
presents itself as a tendency to convert the face-to-face perspective into a
hybrid one, signaling to a paving in the direction of the hybridization of
graduate studies. These are challenges and concerns that echo
and are also directly associated with the precariousness and lightening that
put the quality of postgraduate training at risk.
As signaled throughout the text, the current historical period is
crossed by constant challenges, which were deepened in the context of the COVID-19
pandemic, in particular by the imposition of the ERT.
Throughout this process, ABEPSS remained coherent, firm
and fierce in the fight for the qualification of graduate and postgraduate
training, reaffirming the defense of face-to-face teaching and the
socio-political direction historically constructed by the renewed Social Work.
In addition, ABEPSS produced numerous debates, documents, live transmissions,
publications, subsidies and political-academic
guidelines, available on the entity's pages and website, directing and
strengthening graduate programs and undergraduate courses across the country to
endorse the fights in the uncompromising defense of the critical legacy and the
training project built historically by the profession.
It is in this direction, with the clearness of our side in the class
struggle, of the profession and training project that we defend, as well as the
magnitude of the challenges of the present time, that we need to continue in
defense of the legacy built by renewed Social Work, elaborating answers for
training and professional work, in view of the old and new demands that have
been placed on the profession in this profoundly chaotic scenario. We end,
therefore, with the powerful reflections of Marilda Iamamoto
(2015) when she reminds us that:
The moment we live
in is a moment full of challenges. More than ever, courage is needed, hope is
needed to face the present. You have to resist and
dream. It is necessary to nurture dreams and make them come true on a daily basis in the horizon of new times that are more
humane, fairer, more supportive (Iamamoto, 2015, p. 17).
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Liduina de Oliveira e SILVA Worked
on the conception, data analysis and writing of the article.
Social
Worker. Graduated in Social Work from UFPA.
Master’s and
PhD in Social Work from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo
(PUC-SP). Associate Professor 3 at the Federal University of São Paulo.
Rafaela Bezerra FERNANDES Worked on the conception,
data analysis and writing of the article.
Social Worker.
Graduated in
Social Work and Master’s in Social Politics by the
University of Brasília (UnB). PhD student in Social
Work at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
William Tales Fornazier MOREIRA Worked on the conception, data analysis and writing of the article.
Social
Worker. Graduated in Social Work from the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro (UFTM). Master’s degree and PhD course in
Social Work at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
