Pandemic Impact on Adult Education and Training Practices in Portugal: Professional Perspective

Introduction: Adult Education And Training In Portugal

Over the last two decades, Portugal has been setrengthening, even with interim periods of some regression, public policies for Adult Education and Training that sought to respond to an accumulated deficit of disinvestment and confused solutions (Lima, 2005), through original and integrated practices (Melo, 1998), with the aim of promoting higher levels of schooling and vocational qualification of the Portuguese adult population. These initiatives were part of the multi-annual negotiations with the European Union, operationalizing the application of strategic developmental options, influenced by transnational organizations such as the OECD (1996) and the famous document Lifelong Learning for All, which translated a movement that, as Field (2002) recalled, being true that it was marked by a somewhat autocratic unidimensionality of economic reasons and purposes, it also contributed to help remove educational and training practices for adults from the periphery of public policies in most Western countries.

Without dwelling, exhaustively, on the axiological, epistemological and methodological dimensions, announced and regulated in the legislation that, at the time, established this subsystem, it will be important to remember the central aspects, mainly the clearly more innovative ones, on which it was based (Alcoforado, Vieira & Moio, 2017). First, it was established real conditions for an articulation between vocational training offers and more school education, designated as sociocultural component, which effectively allowed a simultaneous elevation of schooling and professional qualification levels, through flexible and interdisciplinary paths. Then, it created a national service of Recognition, Validation and Certification of Skills acquired in the most diverse situations of life, promoting the emergence of a network of centers, promoted by public, private and social entities, always with public funding, which were assigned the responsibility of implementing and developing these educational practices.

These policy proposals and consequent educational practices were supported by recognized theoretical models (Pineau, 1997; Evans, 2006; Cavaco, 2007; Alcoforado, 2014) and, for the first time for the case of a public policy of adult education in Portugal, they sought a framework in robust models that were being constituted as an epistemological domain with its own specificity, with implicit passage by the andragogical proposals of meaningful learning (Knowles, 1996) and by the challenges of transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000). All this required the creation of new professionalities, such as the Technician of Guidance, Recognition and Validation of Competences, who started to integrate teams with pedagogical coordinators and trainers from different specialties and subject areas (Alcoforado, Vieira & Moio, 2017).

Although Adult Education has assumed itself, over time, as a field of strong pedagogical innovation, including the first distance learning experiences, with the creation of the Open University as a true reference, the truth is that all these experiences were developed in a logic of face-to-face education, only using digital technologies for the development of pedagogical practices. These were, in fact, the outlines of this whole movement of lifelong learning, contributing to transform our life contexts (professional, cultural, citizenship...) in true pedagogical societies, with formal and non-formal education activities, in our different living spaces.