Social Intervention in Youth and Adult Education Contexts: Social Workers Working on Regular Youth and Adult Education Modality in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to comprehend how social workers working in regular Youth and Adult Education (YAE) in Chile understand and what meaning they assign to their experience of professional intervention in this field. From a qualitative approach, six semi-structured interviews were applied to social workers from five different communes of the Metropolitan Region. The main results show that professionals seem to conceive Y&AE from a competency-based approach mainly associated with the development of instrumental skills for labor market insertion and that the professional relationship they establish with community actors responds to a deficiency-based approach, permeated by adverse working conditions that prevent them from fully developing their professional interests. From the above, it is concluded that the meaning that professionals assign to social intervention in this context and the development opportunities they find there, in several occasions is subject to the working conditions that occur in educational establishments, which many times are limited to the limited time available and/or to specific internal work guidelines, which pushes reactive responses or with little planning while the interests and needs of the students are at the center of the debate.