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Top2. Between School And Work In Italy
A paradigm change in educational research has been taking place in Italy for some time (Damiano, 2013; Rivoltella & Rossi, 2012) driven by the contribution of enactivism by Rossi (2011), situated learning (Fabbri 2007) and in Italian edition by Ajello and Sannino (2013) of study about transfer and boundary-crossing by Tuomi-Gröhn and Engeström (2003). What comes out of this is the central importance of the teaching/learning process as a situated inter-action involving a plurality of individuals and contexts that produce learning patterns not always encompassed in the expected goals.
Concrete experience, doing and experiencing, is the main trigger of the learning process as long as it is part of an overall teaching plan guided with specific intent. By reflecting on an experience, it becomes possible to configure new cultural-cognitive artifacts, that is, new knowledge and skills patterns.
One specific area of didactic interest is the world of university curricular internships. The nature of this particular reality is such that it stands between different perspectives, one emphasizing the importance of theory and the other the need for practice. The world of academic teaching, generally polarized around theoretical models, meets the working world, which is usually concerned with getting things done. During the PRIN Employability & Co. - Innovative Curricula to create new professions Project (Boffo, Fedeli & al., 2017), we have begun to reflect on the interrelationship of new technologies and curricular internships in the university context.
Usually, a kind of separation exists between the theoretical models and the world of practice, a sort of dependence of the latter on the previous, resulting in a shortsighted validation of the superiority of classroom training over the straightforward performance requested by practical activities. This separation is due to the different organizational and cultural approaches that characterize the two realities, the educational system (school and university) and the work system (profit, non-profit and public). The educational system expresses this distinction by attributing to the working world competitive, economic, and utilitarian approaches that are hardly suited to educational values, such as personalized learning time, cooperation, and future planning. By the same talking, the working world also expresses this separation, for example, by pointing out to society how the rules that govern production cannot meet all the social expectations required by people. These different interpretive frameworks explain the lack of a sufficient interaction between the two systems, reinforcing a sense of self-referentiality.