Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

The UFSC Social Work program aims to prepare students for the social work practice grounded in a critical analysis of the social reality in order to confront social inequalities.

This requires the development of special skills to act for the strengthening of egalitarian and democratic practices in the interpersonal and institutional scope, while at the same time confronting the mechanisms of oppression and reproduction of subalternity. It is essential that the social worker graduated from UFSC masters the political strategies of social mobilization in order to place popular participation as both a means and an end in the process of ensuring social rights and in designing and implementing public social policies.

It also requires mastery and application of techniques for designing, executing and evaluating plans, programs and projects in the social area, as well as of the dynamics of organizing, planning and managing benefits and services (i.e. visits, technical investigation, reports and information releases on Social Work matters), combining the professional specificity with the interaction in interdisciplinary teams. All this associated with the strategies for disseminating institutional information and guiding the population on identifying resources to assert and defend their rights.

The program develops theoretically critical social workers committed to the achievements and struggles of the working class, able to politicize demands and to strengthen popular participation for the breaking down of political subalternization processes.

It is structured into three sections: i) theoretical and methodological foundations of social life, ii) socio-historical foundations of Brazilian society, and ii) foundations of social work practice. In the early stages, students take general courses, such as: Socio-Historical Formation of Brazil, Introduction to Sociological Theory, and Political Science. In the second half of the program, they take specialized courses on Social Work matters. The curriculum also includes a supervised internship that must be carried out along three consecutive semesters, starting from the sixth semester, and a final thesis (TCC), which must be written in the final semester.