Riflessioni clinico-pedagogiche sulle soft skills nei percorsi formativi per le professioni educative

The topic of the transversal competences and soft skills needed for professions, required both by Europe and by the productive world, has exploded. In 2016, the European Commission issued a new Skills Agenda for Europe, which stresses the centrality of competences, especially digital and entrepreneurship competences, conceived as presuppositions for employment and innovation in the digital economy and society. Nowadays, in Italy a specific law dedicated to the competences of educators and pedagogists has been proposed. The great risk that can be glimpsed in the European model, on a critical and clinical perspective, is in the presumption of engineering existential flows and processes that, with this rationalizing operation, they can really be controlled and governed.The specificity of transversal competences and soft skills of the education professions, which manage with pedagogical intentionality and educational design all the areas of the course of human existence, from birth to old age, in multiple contexts, has to be stressed. Therefore, the formative pathways for the education of these professions require even more urgently a transformation of the pedagogical device, of the learning setting, of the educational models and didactic practices proposed to the students by the teachers and university organizations.La questione delle competenze trasversali e delle soft skills per le professioni, richieste sia dall’Europa sia dal mondo produttivo, è esplosa. Nel 2016, la Commissione Europea ha emanato una nuova Skills Agenda for Europe, che enfatizza la centralità delle competenze, specialmente quelle digitali e connesse alla imprenditorialità, intese come precondizioni per l’occupazione e l’innovazione nella società e nell’economia digitale.In Italia, è stata proposta una specifica legge relativa alle competenze dell’educatore e del pedagogista. Il grande rischio che si può vedere nel modello europeo, da un punto di vista critico e clinico, risiede nell’ingegnerizzazione dei flussi e dei processi esistenziali che si pretende di controllare con la razionalità. La specificità delle competenze trasversali e delle soft skills delle professioni educative, che approcciano con intenzionalità pedagogica e progettazione educativa tutte le età e i contesti del corso dell’esistenza umana, deve essere sottolineata. Pertanto, i percorsi formativi per la formazione di queste professioni richiede una urgente trasformazione del dispositivo pedagogico, del setting di apprendimento, dei modelli educativi e delle pratiche didattiche proposteagli studenti dai docenti e dalle organizzazioni universitarie

THE LOVE THAT FRIGHTENS. CLINICAL-PEDAGOGICAL REFLECTIONS

The experience of love is common to all human beings, of all ages, social classes and geographical origins (Bettetini, 2012; Passerini, 2008). Contemporary society has typically dragged love out of the intimate sphere, partly as a result of technological advances in the mass communication media, especially Internet. The media constantly dwell on the themes of love and sex, honing in on people’s love lives and making gossip about them a global affair, exposing the most intimate details of the love affairs of the famous and not so famous, and shamelessly flaunting nudity

LOVE IN TRANSITION TIMES . THE EDUCATORS OF ADOLESCENTS AMONG CARE , LOVE AND POWER

By this paper, I want to develop the analysis and the reflection on the problems the educators meet, working with difficult adolescents into the socio-educational services, managing the emotional and love relationships of the young. Authoritarian or punitive interventions, when applied to matters that are highly delicate and complex, are bound to generate consequences that are not always positive or under the control of the educators. If educators are not open to exploring the affective dimensions, they may inadvertently reiterate the abuse that their clients have already undergone. It is necessary to give the right space to the expression of the emotional needs and difficulties of adults, educators, youngsters

Supervision as a Kind of Qualitative Evaluation

The contribution presents a reflection on supervision as one of the possible forms of qualitative evaluation, in the field of work with adult educators. Supervision structures a context where theory and practice, emotions and cognitions, values, representations and fears, anxieties and conflicts can be made to dialogue in continuation. The supervisor continuously offers feedback and interpretations to the educators, thanks to attentive listening and decodes what they express. The constructivist approach to Evaluation, on the one hand, gives full value to the subjectivity of the actors involved in the evaluation process and aims to interpret and understand. So, we can call it hermeneutic evaluation (Perla, 2004). Hermeneutic evaluation sets the problem of finding the meaning of the points of view of the participants. This is where the meeting point with the supervision activity, which consists precisely of a practice guided by a leader who helps the educators to better understand their theoretical frameworks of reference and their basic educational models, lies. Supervision and Evaluation therefore represent two important tools for developing the professionalism of the operators, as shown by the case-study analyzed. The practice of supervision is part of a path of  lifelong learning and education (Oggionni, 2013; Zannini, 2005), which passes through experimentation, evaluation and redesigning, in the face of constant monitoring of the needs and learning of the individual and of the team.

Ricerca e formazione alle professioni educative e formative

The author argues that it is an important issue in education today to reflect on the training, university and non-professions education and training. We must ask ourselves how and what the size, the theory and practice of research to be a constituent part of the profession of teacher training. The search must then be placed in the same disciplinary teaching of each discipline, in the very way in which we deal with the contents, of whatever kind they are, must pass through a certain style of teaching that identifies the ‘posture’ research in voltage not to go as exhaustive and closed the knowledge that is taught of the qualifying points. The author considers both qualitative and quantitative assessment tools considering how the case studies can be useful to reflect on the emotional scope of the profession of education

Sostenibilità e partecipazione: una sfida educativa

Education on sustainability and “sustainable” participation needs a culture that underlies it. This is true for the various contexts of sustainable development: environmental, economic and social. In 1987 the Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as “development capable of meeting the needsof the present generation without compromising those of the future generations”. The fundamental basis of this culture of sustainability is a non-individualist and non-privatistic conception of knowledge, of social actions and of planning. Culture – necessary for sustainability to produce it – has to be basedon an idea of “care” of the common social assets. This is why sustainability can really be asserted only through “participation”. However, at times, there has been a façade of participation while under the surface something completely different was going on. It is therefore a question of sustaining the necessityfor a real and practicable “sustainable participation”. It is the participation itself, that has to be rethought in a sustainable way, precisely because it is the basis, according to a virtuous circle, of the possibility that sustainability in its various economic, environmental, social contexts can, in time, be implemented.Participation appears to be fundamental for education on sustainability. There is therefore the need for education on ‘sustainable participation’.L’educazione alla sostenibilità e alla partecipazione “sostenibile’’ ha bisogno di una cultura che la fondi. Questo vale per i vari ambiti dello sviluppo sostenibile: ambientale, economico, sociale. Nel 1987 il Rapporto Brundtland definisce lo sviluppo sostenibile come quello “sviluppo capace di soddisfare i bisogni della generazione presente senza compromettere quelli delle generazioni future’’. Base fondamentale di questa cultura della sostenibilità è una concezione non individualistica e non privatistica dei saperi, delle azioni sociali, della progettazione. La cultura – necessaria perché la sostenibilità si realizzi – si deve fondare su una idea di ‘’cura’’ dei beni sociali comuni.Per questo, la sostenibilità si può veramente affermare solo attraverso la “partecipazione”. Tuttavia, a volte c’è stata una facciata di partecipazione mentre sotto la superficie si agitava tutt’altro.Si tratta dunque di sostenere la necessità di una reale e praticabile “partecipazione sostenibile”. È la partecipazione stessa, cioè, che deve essere ripensata in chiave di sostenibilità, proprio perché è alla base, secondo un circolo virtuoso, della possibilità che la sostenibilità nei suoi vari ambiti economico, ambientale, sociale si possa, nel tempo, realizzare.La partecipazione appare essere fondamentale per l’educazione alla sostenibilità. E dunque vi è la necessità di un’educazione alla “partecipazione sostenibile”

GEN-O-MA project: an Italian network studying clinical course and pathogenic pathways of moyamoya disease—study protocol and preliminary results

Background: GENetics of mOyaMoyA (GEN-O-MA) project is a multicenter observational study implemented in Italy aimed at creating a network of centers involved in moyamoya angiopathy (MA) care and research and at collecting a large series and bio-repository of MA patients, finally aimed at describing the disease phenotype and clinical course as well as at identifying biological or cellular markers for disease progression. The present paper resumes the most important study methodological issues and preliminary results. Methods: Nineteen centers are participating to the study. Patients with both bilateral and unilateral radiologically defined MA are included in the study. For each patient, detailed demographic and clinical as well as neuroimaging data are being collected. When available, biological samples (blood, DNA, CSF, middle cerebral artery samples) are being also collected for biological and cellular studies. Results: Ninety-eight patients (age of onset mean ± SD 35.5 ± 19.6 years; 68.4% females) have been collected so far. 65.3% of patients presented ischemic (50%) and haemorrhagic (15.3%) stroke. A higher female predominance concomitantly with a similar age of onset and clinical features to what was reported in previous studies on Western patients has been confirmed. Conclusion: An accurate and detailed clinical and neuroimaging classification represents the best strategy to provide the characterization of the disease phenotype and clinical course. The collection of a large number of biological samples will permit the identification of biological markers and genetic factors associated with the disease susceptibility in Italy

Pediatric tuberculosis in Italian children: Epidemiological and clinical data from the Italian register of pediatric tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Over the last decades, TB has also emerged in the pediatric population. Epidemiologic data of childhood TB are still limited and there is an urgent need of more data on very large cohorts. A multicenter study was conducted in 27 pediatric hospitals, pediatric wards, and public health centers in Italy using a standardized form, covering the period of time between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2012. Children with active TB, latent TB, and those recently exposed to TB or recently adopted/immigrated from a high TB incidence country were enrolled. Overall, 4234 children were included; 554 (13.1%) children had active TB, 594 (14.0%) latent TB and 3086 (72.9%) were uninfected. Among children with active TB, 481 (86.8%) patients had pulmonary TB. The treatment of active TB cases was known for 96.4% (n = 534) of the cases. Overall, 210 (39.3%) out of these 534 children were treated with three and 216 (40.4%) with four first-line drugs. Second-line drugs where used in 87 (16.3%) children with active TB. Drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis were reported in 39 (7%) children. Improving the surveillance of childhood TB is important for public health care workers and pediatricians. A non-negligible proportion of children had drug-resistant TB and was treated with second-line drugs, most of which are off-label in the pediatric age. Future efforts should concentrate on improving active surveillance, diagnostic tools, and the availability of antitubercular pediatric formulations, also in low-endemic countries