Rights and duties of social educator in practice

Abstract

This article examines the reality of protecting social educators’ rights and the feasibility of performing their duties as they occur in practice. The authors introduce the importance of the topic, review the scientific literature of social teach-ing and discuss topics such as managerial performance, image making, and other comparative aspects. The main focus of the authors is to analyze the results of empirical research regarding the feasibility of the rights and obligations of social work educators in the field. Applying the method of written survey, the sample of the research consists of representa-tives from a variety of Lithuanian cities and districts around the country. These social educator consultants not only represent their cities and districts but are also best aware of the situation because they have both local and national con-cerns in view. The study revealed that despite the establishment of educational institutions for social educators over a decade ago, social educators still continue to deal with the same difficulties as it relates to their duties and rights. For example, relatively few social educators have the opportunity to develop professionally, many of them lack professional communication with other specialists in the school community, and many school principals lack education and compe-tences to evaluate fairly and objectively competencies of a social educator, and , therefore, insufficiently support the pro-fession. The survey also showed that most of the social educators are dissatisfied with their working and material condi-tions, society’s attitude and insufficient attention of parents to representatives of this youngest profession in Lithuania. The article presents a detailed analysis of responses to open questions collected from consultants of social educators, which highlights the relevant problems related to improvement of the indicated problems.