Educational professionalism: a lifelong learning process of constructing educators’ professional identity in multiple learning contexts

The educational professionalism is the result of a process of continuous acquiring of theoretical knowledge, methodological tools and experiential skills, but most important it’s the concrete evidence of a solid professional identity. In a lifelong learning process, a period of training – seen as a starting point – offers the opportunity to come in contact with social work and its complexity, but above all to exchange knowledge and negotiate its sense with professionals, in order to examine opinions and expectations related to the professional profile. The experience of training provides the basis for the development of professional reflective skills, by analysing educational phenomena and bringing into question the significance of actions, in order to go beyond the technicalities and reach deeper levels of understanding. The different learning contexts, experienced both at university and in the field, introduce students to the observation of educational actions and their experimentation, but also stimulate a reflective elaboration: pedagogical supervision stimulates social educators to think critically about their identity, role and professionalism, enabling them to conceptualize knowledge acquired in the field and to formulate connections between theories and intervention strategies.