Developing capabilities contexts during in-service teacher education. Cooperation, agency, empowerment

Abstract

In Italy, the recent entry into force of the Law 107/2015, making it compulsory, permanent and structural in-service teacher education (paragraph 124), puts in close and determining relationship the quality of the supplied education with its effects in educational institutions. Therefore, the most important lever to achieve the widespread quality – of schools and teaching – is given by teachers professional development throughout their career. Lifelong learning and professional development should make teachers as agents of change, transferring new ideas, innovating and transforming their practices and the contexts in which they work. Similarly, the “context” is interdependent with the
professional development, thus influencing the development and the improvement. In the direction of the Capability Approach this means overcoming the logic of hetero-definition specific competencies to define abstract professional profiles, and affirm the opportunities arising from
taking the capacity actions as perspective – both cultural and professional – that allows to direct the operations of choices freely made to achieve improvements that are valid in the built environment – both the school (AVR, Improvement Plans) and the territory (Integrated Education System) – educating teachers who interpret as capability of acting the transformation of professional and contextual practices. Some of the perspective effects consider the methods of in-service education, so that – inspired by Capability principles – they should emphasize cooperation, responsibility, co-construction, activation
and reciprocity, finding then, in a laboratory context, the dimension of coherence.