Challenges of Social Work Education in Mongolia
Social work education in Mongolia has launched in 1997 as a result of the recognition of the need for the professional intervention to deal with the pressing social problems heightened by the social, political, and economic transition of the Mongolian society after its democratic change of 1990. The democratic change laid a strong foundation for promoting social justice, human rights, and development of a civic society in the country. Social work as a professional discipline is new in Mongolia, thus, social work education plays an important role to introduce and popularize social work in the country. More importantly social work education strives to develop national social worker identity. In light of the novelty of the professional and institutional development, the needs of the Mongolian social work education are to develop curricula determined by local, national, and regional needs and priorities, promote professional development and practice-based teaching, and generate educational resources. Current challenges include development of contextualized literature, in-service and degree training of social work educators, training of supervisors in the field, and integration of training curriculum. Presently, there are few social work educators with social work degree and majority of social work teachers has no experience from the field and has therefore no identity as social worker. In the field, there is a lack of qualified social workers, who could serve as supervisors for students. Nonetheless, since its establishment, Mongolian social work education has achieved a lot in producing grass roots social workers to help vulnerable members of the society. There is increasing awareness of the importance of social work and the government and the public give credentials to social workers for their efforts to respond effectively to challenges of social change. Mongolian Association of Social Work Educators was established in 2002 in order to promote quality of social work education in Mongolia. Nowadays social work educators are working on the development of the rule and standards for social work education that is needed to provide effective workers in the human service and development agencies.