VAE and the transformation of cultural and social scapes

Abstract

In the context of training and in the system of applied rationality, the VAE (Validation of Achievements of Experience) represented in France and Europe a device able to integrate knowledge and experience. By enhancing and finding connections between formal, informal, and non-formal knowledge, it developed a strategy that is able to recognize the informal skills inscribed in individuals and turn them into professional qualifications. In this sense, the
VAE finds a place in the history of the European Lifelong learning (permanent education), standing at the centre of a process which has not been completed yet, nor fully extended, but regarded as capable of becoming a flexible tool in diverse contexts. However, nowadays the acknowledgment of learning and experience seems to face highly precarious dynamics and changes.
The structures of knowledge and action are no longer a set of objects and long-lasting forms—which are predictable and certain—but they are rather constructs directed by “moving fluxes” that therefore carry signs, disjuncture and imaginations, i.e. what Appadurai calls local “deterritorialized” contexts within the “scenery” of globalization. The action of training, recognition, and
validation lies within a fluid and uncertain territory, which is torn apart and no longer stable, and which requires a review of its cultural references as well as the processes and procedures of intervention.
This review’s thread starts with Lisbon 2020 goals: intelligence, sustainability and inclusion. It then tries to figure out how it is possible to combine the system of validation of achievements of experience with the educational process and the increasingly plural, uncertain and complex social and professional system.