Social work and pandemic from COVID-19 in Italy: maturing the professional consciousness of being science and art together

In an attempt to investigate globally what the process of becoming aware of the changes that have occurred in social service practice during and after the pandemic emergency from COVID-19 and what reflections have developed around the changes to be made in social service teachings aimed at students, this contribution reports a cross-section of the Italian experience. The first part of the chapter reconstructs what happened historically in Italy during the advent of the pandemic, highlighting, on the one hand, its impact nationwide and across sectors of social and economic life and, on the other hand, the characteristics of its coping from a social service perspective. The reconstruction of the situation in which social service has come to find itself and the various resilience strategies put in place has been possible mainly thanks to the studies that flourished in the pandemic years that highlighted the link between being a person and being a professional, between the protection of health and the protection of the physical and social environment, between the individual and the collective good. These links, which were already there, became more visible and stronger than in the past, to the point of entering the sphere of personal freedoms generating, on the one hand, manifestations of dissent, skepticism, and disbelief with respect to the knowledge that what was happening was real; and on the other hand, manifestations of solidarity on the part of the inhabitants of territorial communities according to reciprocity and with special attention to the weakest groups. In the last part of the chapter, the results of the research carried out in Italy are presented and the testimonies and reflections of the social workers who participated in the study are reported, according to the internationally agreed dimensions of analysis: the process of becoming aware of emergency and the role of social service in emergency; the ethical-political, theoreticalmethodological and theoretical-practical dimensions of professional work in the contexts and organizations to which they belong; and the learnings that professionals believe should be integrated into the training of students who represent the future of social service.