The author has analyzed the formation of social work as a professional activity and singled out model examples and the content of professional training for the construction of project competence in future social work specialists.
Future social workers’ methodological basics have been substantiated and personality-oriented, communicative, culturological, systemic, synergetic, dialectical, historical, praxeological, technological, andragogical, methodological, competence, thesaurus, activity approaches have been implemented. The integration of these approaches ensures the study integrity and a connection between the methodological, theoretical, technological, and practical research concepts.
In the structure of future social workers’ project competence the following is highlighted: a motivational-target component; a cognitive component; an activity component; a communicative component; a self-educational component.
The concept and models of project competence development for future social work specialists in professional training have been developed, as well as the corresponding strategy and pedagogical technologies. The system concept is directed to the gradual complication of future social work projects and their integration into larger social projects by establishing close cooperation with existing professionals in social services in the amalgamated territorial community. At the same time, the system includes both the features of the management system and the features of the synergetic system, which can be adjusted by the teacher depending on the readiness of future social workers for independent activity and the self-organization of student academic groups. The system is considered open under the labor market conditions in the external environment of reforming social services.
To ensure a dynamic project competence development in future social workers the author has developed a strategy that combines project pedagogical technology, self-project educational technology, and mentoring technology.
The primary experimental research using the method of «research in action» has proved the positive dynamics of most criteria indicators of the project competence components according to the experimental groups’ results.
The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in the fact that:
– for the first time, the author's concept of forming project competence of future social work specialists has been theoretically substantiated and developed, which envisages regulation of the system arrangement as a management system or as a synergetic one according to the order parameters observed in a particular academic group; the system for forming project competence of future social work specialists has been modeled as a student-centered platform, which is open to broader processes on the labor market and reform in providing social services; the implementation strategy has been developed for the system of forming project competence of future social work specialists, including project pedagogical technology, self-project pedagogical technology, pedagogical technology of mentoring; the essence of the concept «Project competence of a future social work specialist» has been concretized and introduced into scientific circulation as a complex intermediate result of training and practice, whose start is the reproduction of the sequential actions of self-project activities and whose continuation is motivated, conditioned by the thesaurus and standards project activities (including as part of a team) for the development, realization of human rights, family, group, the authorship of which the future social work specialist deliberately shares with the client (clients), learning to act together with them in conditions of limited resources and an uncertain situation; the structure of future social work specialists' project competence has been determined in the motivational-target, cognitive, activity, communicative, self-educational components;
– improvements have occurred in project pedagogical technology in the study of social and humanitarian disciplines in a sequence of several iterations at project problem amplification, as well as with the implementation of the strategy variability function in establishing inter-subject connections; a self-project pedagogical technology as a quasi-self-project technology, that opens up the prospects for future professionals to understand further self-designing and self-development, and also creates the indicative basis for students to foster self-design and self-development for prospective social work clients;
– a further development has taken place in understanding the essence of a social work specialist’s professional training by highlighting a project competence as the basic one for other specialist competencies; the method of «research in action» as a diagnostic tool to ensure the effectiveness of pedagogical systems.
