Origen y desarrollo de la configuración institucional de la Facultad de Trabajo Social de Huelva, 1968-1983

Abstract

Our Doctoral Thesis treats on the origin and the institutional configuration of the Social Work School of Huelva and includes a fifteen year period, from 1968 to 1983. To be able to get to the focus of our investigation, we have done a tour through the different ways of social action that have existed in history since the Social Work is a profession that has been constructed in the social and political structure of several centuries, though its consolidation takes place in the XlXth and XXth century. Afterwards, we go on to study its specific historical context where the Social Work is born, mainly in the European and American society. We have seen also the role that the women have had in the history as creators and promoters of Social Work and of the schools, which have also been an object of our attention, as they are the first place where the future professionals take contact with the profession. As for the methodology used, vve have focused mainly on the use of the historical files of the School and interviews done to persons who were linked to it. We have also done a bibliographical review to establish the theoretical conceptual frame, as well as the review of all the available investigations that have approached the topic of Social Work from the schools where this education were taught. The School of Social Work of Huelva was started by the arrival to this city of the Industrial center, its aim was the growth of the Spanish industry, as it happened in other parts of Spain as Barcelona, Basque Country and Madrid, where were established industrial structures that, in turn, generated multiple social problems and also were opened the first Social Work schools. The School of Huelva had a critical period that threatened seriously with its closing. All this process is analyzed and is investigated in the celebration of March 6 as institutional day of the School, which answers to the moment in which mobilizations where started by the teachers and pupils due to the problems that they were harassing the school and that could have caused its closure. It is necessary to place on record a series of conclusive aspects on how an entity that was born as a space of studies without almost any structure goes on to become a School where is taught an academic title similar to other schools of the same type that existed in Spain, not without going through serious difficulties for its institutional consolidation. From an average of 16,5 pupils per course from 1970-1971 (year in which three courses started) to 1973-1974 it goes up to 112 in three courses in 1982-1983. There are a series of circumstances by which the School remains without a juridical figure that supports it, added to other factors will generate in a conflict that will be kept in total effervescence from the course of 1977-1978 up to 1979-1980, year in which it is constituted fully as a Social Work School by a Foundation, beginning a new period based on a juridical recognition, an economic reparation, review of the study plans and formalization of the procedures to be part of the School as a teacher. From this course on, we can say that the School of Social Work of Huelva is born. Regarding to the new contributions that we do with our investigation, we can do the first summary as the response that it gives to a need of the current panorama of the Spanish Social Work, that of knowing our own history, in order that it will be understood by future generations. That will not be possible, we think, without knowing the particularities of the different schools, since the link of them to the development of the professionalization of Social Work is, nowadays, an absolute fact. To know and to recognize the different difficulties by which the academic institutions have had to go through makes our origins shine, even though our cradle was insignificant. This is our maximum intention, to know the origin of this school and with it, help to extend the landscape of the Spanish Social Work, since until the particular histories are not known, this landscape will continue being incomplete.