From dream to profession: building bridges of meaning to cross uncertainty in vocational learning

The view of the professionalism dedicated to care proves nowadays to be increasingly heterogeneous and diversified. The multiplicity of figures is accompanied by different language and communication styles, which need to find a meeting point to better understand and legitimise each other’s differences and distinctive capabilities. Only the real integration among such differences and capabilities can lead to true and authentic care. But how can you bring students to acquire such consciousness and the essential transversal skills that are required to actively practice it? How can you help them to identify their needs, their fears, their insecurities and preconceived constructions – often unconsciously taken – against the exercise of a profession that can be configured as one of the most delicate and constitutively drenched by responsibility? These are some of the questions that we tried to answer, describing a case of clinical-training approach applied in a university classroom, where living the group dimension within the protected container of training has proved to be a critical step for the authentic understanding of different listening levels by subjects, which started to recognized themselves in a new dimension of role – from weak and indefinite to possible carriers of innovative projects