Notes on educating social workers in the context of graduates' preparation for work with clients in practice In this contribution, I would like to present some ethical dilemmas and questions that I, as a university lecturer at the Department of Social Work, encounter and face in my practice. While multiple articles and discussions touch on these recommendations, changes remain too vague, so I will once again call for reform of the educational system that would resolve the ethical dilemmas of many educators.

The public image of social work as a profession, and especially the study of social work, is not very favourable in Slovakia. The reasons are varied, but as educators in self-reflection, we need to re-evaluate from the source of professional social work, that is, from students' preparation for professional practice. What is our own relationship and approach to the profession of university lecturer and to the profession of social worker and the field of social work? Do we reflect these attitudes to students? What message and impression do we leave them? Do we motivate them, support them, or devalue their study and discipline? Are we exemplary moral and professional models? Do we represent and support a good image of social work? The truth is that we strongly influence students' opinion, and they, through their approach, opinions, and practice, mediate it to their environment. In society's mind, demeaning views about our graduates, educators, and similarly generalized media cases related to the profession still resonate. We have our share in this collective consciousness, and the possibility of change lies on our shoulders as well. As a final ethical point, I cannot omit a statement from OSHA: “Those who are captivated by the personality of a teacher may not realize the gaps in their teaching, but those who are not influenced by a teacher's teaching will see only those gaps.”

Another ethical dilemma I encounter in practice concerns the readiness of graduates to perform professional activities. The education system is inflexible; significant changes since the establishment of the field have not occurred, while requirements and external reality are changing constantly. In the information age, higher education currently provides only minimal information, acting as a weak information search tool compared to the possibilities of the internet. Facts, theories, information, legal provisions— all this is available online to everyone. Apart from the diploma, we basically provide no clearly greater benefit. We still have not managed to apply Comenius's saying "škola hrou", the principles of experiential pedagogy, or the psychology of motivation and learning. Students hear theory "a hundred times" but do not see it. As head of practice seminars, I will say that most students do not complete real practice in the required number of hours, and if they do, they perform auxiliary work that only marginally relates, if at all, to social work. Because they are neither trained nor practically prepared during their studies, they fear failing when practicing. On the other hand, we also cannot blame the often frequent unwillingness of organizations to allow students to engage in direct work with clients for understandable reasons. This is an "enchanted" circle that leads to students formally having practice according to the law but lacking awareness of reality and experience. The mistake by educational institutions is insufficient cooperation with organizations in providing practicum: there are too many students, and organizations have no time to work with students, nor do they see any major significance or benefit.

It is mistaken to assume that students prefer the current system – lecture, self-study, exam. Based on several surveys, students themselves call for the introduction of practical study methods. One output of the research project "Bližšie k zamestnaniu vďaka lepšej príprave na prax počas štúdia na VŠ", organized by o.z. ASSP in 2008, was that 48 % of respondents did not feel that school gives them sufficient knowledge, skills, and experience needed for the performance of a helping profession. They called for a stronger connection between theory and practice, drills on tests and methods, standard procedures, work with aids, more application tasks to consolidate knowledge, more information on new trends, training in concrete techniques and procedures for working with different clients, information on how to appropriately combine and integrate these procedures and techniques, activities focused on self-awareness and social skill training, interaction-based subjects aimed at developing personality competencies and professional competencies. Students are not satisfied with teaching in which lecturers merely pass on pre-studied information from books and publications. Among the recommendations of this survey, in addition, was that practical needs in professional performance should determine more strongly the teaching content (Gymerská, 2008). In Mgr. Radoslav Vengrina's (2013) survey, in which respondents were social workers and crisis interveners in practice, as many as 75 % of respondents did not believe communication skills are sufficiently represented in the educational process at universities.

During final discussions in socio-psychological trainings, I receive feedback from students who would welcome more trainings and workshops, despite the fact that they are external trainees. In counselling-skills trainings, they are often confronted with a lack of communication skills and lack experience working with clients, despite having completed 4 practicum placements. Students want to learn for life, not for school, as Seneca would say.

This lack of knowledge about real social work is also linked to a conscience and responsibility dilemma in grading. During final examinations, we must grade a student who answered a state exam theory question excellently but was not oriented in practice questions. The dilemma is whether to award the diploma to a student whom we classified on the basis of excellent memory and clearly significant time invested in studying, yet allow them to enter reality without practical habits and skills. The assumption that they still will not do social work professionally because externs often work in other sectors should be unacceptable for a lecturer. We should always ensure that every graduate is capable of performing the profession immediately after receiving the diploma. Higher education should be a real possibility of changing the current profession for graduates. To be frank, no one would go to a doctor knowing they only know the human body from books without illustrations...

As I have already indicated, changing the educational system on social work departments could significantly help turn public opinion about social work as a profession, about studying social work, and about the quality of social work in the provision of social services. As others have appealed, it is necessary to increase the ratio of practical activities to theory within study. In the global trend there is a shift away from conventional content-oriented learning toward competence- and performance-oriented education. Greater emphasis is placed on skills, such as how information is used, as opposed to examining information itself (Oliver, 2003). Educators move from the role of "expert on a given content" to the role of mentor (Zhao, 2011). The student is at the centre of attention, not the teacher, and learning is adapted to student needs, abilities, interests, and pace. At the same time it requires greater activity from the student, who thereby becomes more aware of their greater responsibility in their own learning process. Instead of knowledge acquisition, it is about knowledge construction, knowledge creation (Zhao, 2011). The following proposals should help with that:

From the education system of every country, the greatest progress is expected in information and computing technologies to support teaching. The school as a social institution is forced to integrate into the new information society concept, characterised by increasing need to work with information technology tools. With appropriate use of the internet in the educational process, teaching quality can improve, which is value creation that is also measurable (the additional amount of knowledge that students would not acquire without technology, plus reduced lecturer costs for teaching).

E-learning can be understood as multimedia support for the educational process using modern information and communication technologies. Its core task is unlimited access to education in time and space. It does not replace traditional classrooms but elevates them to a higher level and represents an effort toward mutual interaction between education and information technologies. Among the greatest advantages of e-learning is the possibility of combining it with classical education, so-called blended-learning, which connects teachers' experience with the advantages of information technologies. This brings education into new dimensions, making it much more engaging, targeted, and efficient for students. E-learning creates a platform which educational theory textbooks describe as a platform for the future of education.

Advantages of introducing e-learning for students:

  • presentation of teaching materials—compared with traditional study literature, it enables the computer to provide information moderated by lecturers, updated almost immediately when needed,
  • individual time and space planning of study,
  • consultations with lecturers in reserved formats at reserved times,
  • mutual cooperation between students and collaboration on projects,
  • unlimited and repeated access to information sources; students can repeat course material from previous years, and can retrospectively learn about changes that have occurred in theory,
  • immediate feedback,
  • the student becomes not only an object but also a subject of the teaching process,
  • flexible work with new knowledge and information,
  • compact literature and other important information sources needed to complete studies in one place,
  • more study time, since students should have materials and conditions to complete the course from the start of the semester,
  • access to materials focused on practical activities and social worker skills, including sample videos from the counselling process, audio samples, examples, solutions, and more.

Advantages of introducing e-learning for lecturers:

  • collaboration among teachers teaching the same subject, which allows material unification,
  • assigning individual tasks, exercises, and links for students, and because they are individual and sent electronically to the lecturer, originality can be more systematically verified, and all outputs can be stored on a server,
  • allows the teacher to become a lecturer who focuses attention on problematic areas,
  • consultation with students anywhere (if internet access is available),
  • overview of all materials provided to students throughout their studies,
  • possibility of discussion with students and lecturers in forums,
  • possibility to present one's own work,
  • teaching quality is less dependent on the presentational skill of the instructor; study materials carry greater weight in quality assessment.

Advantages of introducing e-learning for the school:

  • reduced costs for lecturers' lecture activity (in some subjects),
  • increased publication activity of lecturers who create shared scripts as part of unified lecture delivery of one subject,
  • more precise and targeted evaluation of the educational process,
  • potential to increase the number of students without affecting teaching capacities,
  • low costs of introducing e-learning compared to the past— in the simplest case this is only the salary of a programmer,
  • reduced travel and accommodation costs for lecturers.

E-learning can be used to publish photos, audio recordings (e.g., lectures), video recordings suitable as practical supplements to teaching, presentation of organizations focused on social services (which students often do not know), and a "marketplace" of practicum opportunities. It also brings space for creating verification tests, case studies and their solutions, alternative solutions, examples of the counselling process, templates of client record sheets, and so on. Shifting away from traditional passive learning—listening, watching, and note-taking—to interactivity and multiple channels of information acquisition helps achieve better learning outcomes. At the same time, multimodal teaching materials, through their attractiveness and interactivity, attract and motivate students to learn more (Zhao, 2011).

If we made theoretical information and requirements available to students online before the start of a course, students would come to lectures already prepared with the theory, and there would be space for additional clarifications and questions, especially for the lecturer who would explain the theory in reality with examples, role plays, and so on. Outputs of the course could include: practical presentation of individual and team work results, discussion, demonstration, preparation of a case study, solving a case study, writing an essay, proposed solutions to a task, field observation notes, drafting an anamnesis interview record, project proposal, proposal for legislative change, analysis, and others. Outputs should always require the need to study the theory. This would exclude simple memory testing of the student and would lead them to critical thinking and linking theory to reality. The benefit of e-learning for students could be openness, the ability to create alternative solutions, the ability to apply theoretical knowledge in practice, the ability to deduce, assess, and evaluate, decide, and think responsibly while weighing risks.

The question is not whether to introduce e-learning into the system, but when. A positive example in our context is the introduction of e-learning at Trnava University, Technical University of Košice, UKF Nitra, and the Slovak University of Health Sciences, among others. Students in the first year of the bachelor's programme (full-time and external forms of study) Applied Economics at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava were taught through blended-learning on the course Academic Writing Techniques and through e-learning on the course Informatics. Evaluation sheets showed room for more frequent use of blended-learning methods, with only 17 % of students considering these methods less sufficient forms of teaching (Decsi - Lovrantová, 2011).

A further proposal for introducing practice is support for student projects. We still do not use the potential of creative students and of externals who work in various sectors. If, for example, they were given an assignment at the beginning of the fourth year to create projects in teams that the department would then support and help to organize, they would use their theoretical knowledge in practical application, which they could later use in creating the final thesis with recommendations for practice that would be truly actionable. Lecturers of those departments could act as tutors and project guarantors, and use running projects for their own activity and for placing students in professional practice. In this way, we could fill missing and needed areas of support in the social sphere and create space for volunteering and graduate employment. We would use the creativity and views and experiences of young people; through this form we would motivate them not only to study, but also to develop social awareness and thinking. It is often said that young people do not have properly formed values. By involving them in the social sphere, which helps society and other people, and by giving them the possibility to participate in visible outcomes of their work, we would offer them more than they would normally expect from study.

Conclusion

J. Taylor said: “It is our duty to make the world better than we found it.” In a transferred sense, it should be our duty as educators to make the educational system better than we found it.

Author: PhDr. Veronika Tolnayová, PhD. List of bibliographic references

ADARSHA, Liana Safi. 2012. (r)Evolution of Consciousness. Martin: Hladohlas, 2012. 219 s. ISBN 978-80-89502-25-7. DECSI, Karol. - LOVRANTOVÁ, Katarína. 2011. Method and didactics of blended learning and e-learning in teaching technical subjects in the academic environment in Slovakia. A case study. In Medzinárodná vedecká elektronická konferencia pre doktorandov, vedeckých pracovníkov a mladých vysokoškolských učiteľov Prešov 2011. MVEK Prešov, Katedra pedagogiky FHPV PU. s. 381 - 387 [online]. Prešov: Katedra pedagogiky FHPV PU [cit. 2013-10-02]. Available on the Internet: http://konferenciapresov2011.weebly.com/10/post/2011/06/desci-karol-lovrantov-katarna.html. GYMERSKÁ, Martina. 2008. The state of professional placements on faculties of the humanities in the Bratislava self-governing region. In The importance of professional practice during university studies in the social field for employability. Bratislava: ASSP, 2008, s. 6 - 16. Electronic conference proceedings. [online]. [cit. 2013-10-02]. Available on the Internet: http://prax.assp.sk/files/dad39881541851cca5703d001381ee49 OLIVER, Ron. 2003. The role of ict in higher education for the 21st century: Ict as a change agent for education. In Proceedings of the higher education for the 21st century conference. Perth : Cowan University. 2003. [online]. [cit. 2013-10-02]. Available on the Internet: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.9509&rep=rep1&type=pdf. VENGRIN, Radoslav. 2013. Quality of communication in crisis intervention. Bratislava. VŠ ZaSP sv. Alžbety v Bratislave. Master's thesis. 84 s. ZHAO, Hong. 2011. Introducing ICT in a Traditional Higher Education Environment. In LIN, Song - HUANG, Xiong. Advances in Computer Science, Environment, Ecoinformatics, and Education, China : CSEE, 2011, s. 129-132. ISBN: 978-3-642-23344-9. [online]. [cit. 2013-10-02]. Available on the Internet: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-23345-6_25.

The paper was presented at the scientific conference Applied Ethics in Social Work II, held on 16.-17. 10. 2013 in Piešťany.