Social and cultural contexts as opportunities for life-long learning: Shared planning and construction of new local educational spaces

Abstract

This article makes use of data gathered by a research undertaken in collaboration with Cultural Associations of the township of Laives (BZ). Such research analyses the rise of a cross and strategic skill — “learning to learn” — with focus on necessary matters that are inherent to the multi-faceted perspective on educational environments. These matters are: (a) the entanglement between the training of human resources and the construction of a social capital meant as the drive towards individual and social well-being; (b) re-thinking of educational success meant as a useful requirement to start life-long learning processes; (c) the fact that if school is meant as a project of human and cultural capability and social cohesion, then it is required to enable people to live and grow up in a complex and multicultural society whose spaces are expanded thanks to digital technologies and whose limits of learning are re-defined; (d) the necessity of being able to manage and face the heterogeneity that, as a consequence of the multicultural society, is rooted in the cohabitation of plural cultures; (e) the close relation between scholastic results and contextual background. Therefore, it is acknowledged the need to develop reflexive capabilities—both internal and external with regard to people and contexts that are able to provide guidance when unexpected experiences occur and retrace the thread of awareness in order to find meanings and strategies that are able to map again everybody’s cognitive and metacognitive world through the threefold dimensionality of life-long learning—which is a shared educational system. After an analysis of the competences, this research offers some guidelines for the realization of life-long learning policies.