Modelling a University Learning Context in Blended Learning. A Case Study Based on Adult Educators Traineeship Program

Italian educational professionals are actually trained by a University course lasting three years for educators and five years for adult educators. In Italy, as anywhere else in the world, the educational job does not only consist in the specific work of educating played with children, teenagers or adults who need to receive an instructional or educative service. To make really effective an educative action we obviously need a coherent pedagogical vision, settings, methods, sensibility, instructional tools and so on, but it is also very important the work of coordination, planning, organisation and management that allow the educational service to operate. In our Country, these functions are played by adult educators, interpreted as professionals with a Master Degree that operate as specialists of educational processes. This professional profile has a specific role in projecting, managing, evaluating educational services: he/she can be employed as a coordinator, a director, a consultant, a supervisor in the educational field. Italian adult educators, in this sense, have to develop different competences, because they would need to perform various roles. The paper will present a University training experience for Italian adult educators, consisting in both e-learning, group meetings and a period of education on the job. In order to realize a meaningful learning context, this programme addressed a series of challenges related to: - the possibility to create a "bridge" between university and professional contexts - the possibility to create a collaborative space between students and tutors supported and mediated by e-learning platform - the possibility to develop research skills and a reflective sight in order to reach such professional competences. After a one-year experimentation of this model, we made an evaluation based on feedbacks coming from the participants. Our paper will critically explore the three main assumptions underlying our programme in the light of students' feedbacks. The connection between university and professional contexts highlighted student difficulties in connecting the different perspectives they met during their studies, difficulties in recognizing their competences and in negotiating their role with external institutions. Moreover one the main bewilderment consisted in focusing their learning interests and their future professional identity. The idea of setting up a collaborative space in blended learning resulted in students' difficulties related to work in group, share ideas and receive others' feedback. This difficulties were stressed by the use of an e-learning platform (moodle). Finally the idea of planning a research project in an educational context was, in our intentions, a key point in learning to master the main skills requested for a pedagogical consultant, supervisor or coordinator. This implies that a student is able to identify his/her own learning interest and to clarify his/her own idea of a professional future, in a word, a student who is an actor on the scene and is willing to shift away from a passive position. These kind of assumptions crashed against students' self- positioning in relation to the task and with their need of a more structured guidance. After the evaluation process we realized that all these dimensions could not be taken for granted and needed a place for being discussed. These considerations lead us to re-design our traineeship programme and to investigate in a deeper way the role of universities in organizing and managing professionalizing paths