Clinical-pedagogical reflections on soft skills in formative pathways for the education professions

Abstract

The topic of the transversal competences and soft skills needed for professions, required both by Europe and by the productive world, has exploded. In 2016, the European Commission issued a new Skills Agenda for Europe, which stresses the centrality of competences, especially digital and entrepreneurship competences, conceived as presuppositions for employment and innovation in the digital economy and society. Nowadays, in Italy a specific law dedicated to the competences of educators and pedagogists has been proposed. The great risk that can be glimpsed in the European model, on a critical and clinical perspective, is in the presumption of engineering existential flows and processes that, with this rationalizing operation, they can really be controlled and governed.
The specificity of transversal competences and soft skills of the education professions, which manage with pedagogical intentionality and educational design all the areas of the course of human existence, from birth to old age, in multiple contexts, has to be stressed. Therefore, the formative pathways for the education of these professions require even more urgently a transformation of the pedagogical device, of the learning setting, of the educational models and didactic practices proposed to the students by the teachers and university organizations.