Focus Dilemmas. Polish School of Social Work in The Face of Global Change: From Community Traditions, Through the Challenges of Professionalization, To the Needs of Internationalization

Abstract

The article discusses the priorities of contemporary education in the field of social work, taking into account the challenges of co-creating the culture of aid in Poland and in the world. It shows that this process in Poland took place in the specific political, historical, economic and cultural conditions of the last three decades, separating the roles and functions of professionalizing aid entities in the post-transformation reality of the three sectors. At the same time, the neoliberal market of competing social services and the popularized patterns of various international practices have led to the mixing of the goals and tasks of aid actors, taking the form of parcel bags. The title dilemmas of concentration are the result of the controversy around the education of contemporary social services, in their simultaneous local and global dimensions, attempts to combine axiological missionary and pragmatic management, as well as the needs of selection, limiting and designating frames in order to set priorities for current, often quite unclear, dynamically changing tasks. Sectoral constraints and territorial divisions of functions (local, national, international) generate tension and struggle, obscuring the helping ideas. The article argues that contemporary education for social work in Poland should openly and critically undertake discussions in this area, especially in the face of the need to change the paradigm of education from positivist to critical, from institutional and subject to subjective and co-creative, so that people educated to undertake aid activities are aware of the responsibility for shaping the aid system of a new era, and ready to participate in the processes of its change.