Teacher education and the formal-informal divideg

Abstract

In adult professional training, it is nowadays stressed the importance of skill (competence) development, with a particular focus on the transmission and mobility of knowledge required to face specific situations and problems.
However, such development is not easy to accomplish, since the obtainment of competences is a complex process that integrates the subject level with the social one, and that it is realized in formal and informal contexts.
Both practices of life-long training and the recent studies on those processes show that only adequate integration between loci and learning techniques could account for an efficient answer to the emerging needs of professional training and development. This paper focusses mainly on the case of teacher training, and it is specifically concerned with the condition of teachers in their last pre-service stage when faced with the issue of “gaining experience” as a learning practice, which is located among formal and informal professional elements. Such condition grounds competence transfert in professional and scholastic contexts.