On October 11th , 2017, School of International Education held an academic lecture themed “the professionalization of social work”. The lecture was given by a well-known Canadian scholar – Prof. Tuula Heinonen, which was attended by students of 2017 Mofcom Foreign Aid Degree Program. The aim of the lecture was to deepen the students’ understanding of social work through the discussion of the history and professionalization process of social work.
Prof.Tuula Heinonen talked about the professionalisation process of social work. And then she introduced the influence of industrialization and urbanization on development of professionalisation of social work. In the early stage, social work was “to do something good for other people”; later, it experienced a period of time when it had been doubted continuously whether it was a profession or not; after that, it started to own its professional methods; and finally gradually developed into a profession acknowleged by the whole world. Besides the development of the profession in the world, Prof. Tuula Heinonen also introduced the development of social work in China, as well as making comparisons of social work situations in various countries. In the end, Prof. Heinonen mentioned the ethical problems and challenges the profession face.
During the lecture, the students actively participated in the interactions, and introduced their own country’s situations of social work. Prof. Heinonen listened carefully to all these sharings and led the discussions with her professional knowledge.
Prof. Heinonen has been teaching at the university of Manitoba of Canada for 25 years. She was a practitioner as well as a researcher on gender and family health care in the Philippines. Her research fields include development of international social work, social gender, women’s healthy and so on. Morover, the courses she teaches include healthy and social work, qualitative research, social work practice, Creative methods in the survey and so on.
The lecture gave the students an all-round understanding of social work. After the lecture, the students expressed their thankfulness to Prof. Heinonen for gaining a lot of knowleged, and hoped that they could take part in more lecture like this in future.
