Abstract:

In the context of focusing social work on services and empowering and applying practice to the training of students, education in social work is perceived as a historical contributor to service-learning development (Zieren & Stoddard, 2004). On the other hand, several authors (Lemieux & Allen, 2007; Phillips, 2011) state that education in social work suffers from a lack of fundamental understanding of the essence of service-learning and very often confuses service-learning with practice education and volunteering, ignoring the focus of service-learning on activities conducted in cooperation with the community and the development of competencies in the field of civic engagement.

The study aims to verify how individual forms of social work practice education develop the competencies of students. The research group consisted of 33 respondents - students of social work (AMage= 21.6; SDage= 1.3; 27.3% of men) who completed their practice during the two academic years 2021/22 and 2022/23 either in the form of service-learning (17 students) or classical form (9 students). The respondents assessed the development of professional competencies on the Communication and Interaction Effect Style Questionnaire Scale by Mlcak (2005) and key competencies through the online tool V-skills for employability (Brozmanova et al., 2014). The respondents assessed their competencies before and after completing the practice. The interval between tests was more than six months.

The research results showed a statistically significant difference in the developed competencies between students completing a practice in the form of service-learning and those who completed a classic face-to-face internship. These specific competencies were: Ability to orientate and plan the counseling process, Ability to support and help the client's self-sufficiency, Counselling skills, Learning competencies, and Social and personal responsibility. In all cases, those students who completed their practice in the form of service-learning achieved higher scores in the assessed competencies. It was a strong material significance (Cone's d more than 0.9). When comparing the students' assessment of their level of competence before completing the practice, no statistically significant differences were found between students. Thus, we can conclude that in our research group, the completion of a course in the form of service-learning proved effective in the development of the professional competences of social work students, which is also confirmed by the qualitative analysis of data obtained through student reflections on their professional practices and the experiences gained during them, where the students gave a highly positive evaluation a variety of experiences that they gained precisely through course completed in the form of service learning. In our case, service-learning also proved itself as an alternative form of practice, which, based on our experience and research results, we recommend being used by other future helping professionals.

Keywords:

Service-learning, social work, practice education.