THE WORK OF THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT IN EDUCATION: expansion of the occupational space and precariousness in student assistance
Social Work. Education. Expansion of the occupational. Social transformations. Precarisation of work.
This dissertation deals with the work of the social worker 's in education, in the particularity of the assistance to the student. It is assumed that, as a salaried worker, the Social Work is not immune to the impacts of societal transformations and their implications on the working class, including precariousness. Taking as a locus of research the Federal Education Institutions (IFEs) of the city of Natal/RN, it is sought to analyze the determinants and forms by which precarization is expressed in professional work in education, in the context of the expansion of the occupational space in the assistance to the students. Based on the critical dialectic method, it was tried to problematize, from the changes that cross the higher education in Brazil, notably from the first decade of the 21st century, the elements that contributed to the expansion of the labor market in the scope of educational policy and the conditions under which this expansion materialized. As a way of subsidizing the theoretical-methodological analysis, in addition to the field research with social workers inserted in the IFEs, through semi-structured interviews, the bibliographic review, which followed the entire process of this study, and the documentary research, which involved among others, the study of documents related to the researched institutions. The reflections made it possible to understand that, although the specificities are preserved, the work of the social worker in the IFEs is crossed by the precariousness, which becomes structural in contemporary capitalism, being expressed in these spaces, among other forms, in the work overload, in the increase their pace and intensity, the duration of the journey and the demand for immediate results; still suffers from refutations of student assistance as a selective and focused policy. Expressed in professional work, precariousness reflects not only its development, but also affects social workers through physical and emotional exhaustion and challenges them to seek strategies to resist it.