Academic production and professional training: challenges and perspectives for social work.

This 52nd issue of the journal Em Pauta: social theory and contemporary reality commemorates the 30th anniversary of the academic project of the UERJ School of Social Work (FSS/UERJ). The issue's emphasis is on the curriculum of the undergraduate course in force until 2014 and the three decades of publication of this journal, hence the relevance of this issue's thematic dossier: The 1993 Curriculum and Em Pauta--FSS/UERJ: professional training and knowledge production.

Em Pauta was born in 1993, at the dawn of the construction of the rule of law, right after the Years of Lead of the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985). In the initial post-dictatorship period, the enjoyment of civil, political, and social rights and the set of democratic achievements are embodied in an organized civil society, with a strong presence in the public scene. Collective needs and interests, living conditions, and culture of social subjects are expressed there, with emphasis on workers, in their diversity: men and women, whites, afro-descendants, indigenous people, elderly, adults, and young people in their differences of sex, religious creeds, and territories, in the countryside and in the city.

The public university pulses in defense of its autonomy, of free education, in its functions of teaching, research, and extension rooted in Brazilian reality and in Hispanic American countries, in a necessary international dialogue. The demands and organized movements have the participation of students, teachers, and professionals. These collective expressions explain and guide transformations operated in Brazilian social work--in academic and professional training and production, in work, and in the organization of the category. Such transformations present an elective affinity with the progressive legacy of the Movement for the Reconceptualization of Social Work in Latin America, while at the same time overcoming it, through theoretical and political maturation in the analysis of contemporary society and the profession of social work in its own scope.

In a very brief retrospective, it is worth to point out, at the very least, significant milestones that were: the antecedent processes that culminated in the "Congresso da Virada", in 1979; and the proposition of professional training in social work anchored in a perspective based on dialogues with Marx's social theory and, especially, nourished by the formulations of Professor Dr. Marilda Iamamoto, in Social relations and social work in Brazil: outline of a historical-methodological interpretation, from 1982.

The repositioning of social work as a profession advanced, reinforcing its commitment to the working class, even though its demands and requirements were related to the development of monopoly capitalism in Brazil. It was, then, a long process of theoretical and political construction that, expressed in the 1979 congress, had national impact on propositions and conceptions of professional training in social work in the Minimum Curriculum of 1982. The resizing of the profession reverberated in subsequent processes, including the Curriculum Guidelines.

The year 1993 is emblematic for social work, as new legal, ethical, and political parameters of the profession are reviewed and approved, guided by the historical-critical perspective in the reading of capitalist society dynamics and in the commitment to the world of labor, as well as with the legacy of historical struggles of workers and their social movements. The Code of Professional Ethics and Law 8662, which provides for the profession of social worker and expresses its regulation, are from that same year of 1993. Such elements subsidize the formulation of Curriculum Guidelines for the Social Work undergraduate courses nationwide. They were built collectively and locally, and approved in 1996 in the form of a minimum curriculum for the Social Work undergraduate course --by the then Brazilian Association for Teaching in Social Work (Abess), today the Brazilian Association for Teaching and Research in Social Work (Abepss).

Particularly, in the commemorative spirit of 30 years of Em Pauta and the "1993 Curriculum"--of our school--, it is important to remember that the formulation of the latter was related to a moment of convergence of several theoretical and political-pedagogical choices and initiatives. Its antecedents also reside in that political and cultural environment related to the rethinking of the social direction of the professional training of social work in Brazil.

Within the scope of the FSS/UERJ, it is necessary to recognize the specific context in which the construction and implementation of the 1993 Curriculum was developed, to which a set of initiatives converged that involved the different segments of the academic unit, mobilized and involved in this common investment. In the environment of the academic unit and the university, processes and struggles for its democratization were developed, with emphasis on: the resistance of the 1982 student strike; proposals for collegiate and equally distributed management of its segments; investment in the constitution and qualification of teaching staff who entered through public tenders, establishing an intergenerational composition; and also, the articulation with social movements. All these aspects summarized postulated the defense of professional training, production and socialization of knowledge in the perspective of a socially-centered and democratically conceived university.

Derived from nationwide formulations on professional training, which already guided the necessary relationship between theory, method, and history, the collective and instituting enterprise of building the 1993 Curriculum, at FSS/UERJ, took on unique contours. It turned to the articulation between the conception of social work and labor; the recognition of social policies as a field of professional activity, in particular, social assistance; and, also, for the cultural and pedagogical dimensions that should inform the training project in its theoretical-practical articulation. One highlight is the option for training aimed at working students, choosing as priority the exclusive offer of night classes, as well as a process of collective discussion based on work groups, capable of contemplating these different dimensions and elementary axes in the elaboration of the curriculum.

This broad and intense collective debate resulted in a curriculum concept that goes beyond a formal structure of...