Transitions Between Different Learning Contexts: Themes, Issues and Problems

Educational work is intrinsically complex and educators and teachers know it very well, even very tiring from a psychological, affective, relational and often physical point of view. In addition, today’s working, social, cultural and political conditions make it even harder to carry out the educational profession, especially if you are seeking to provide high-quality training. Thus, professionals strongly need to find a temporary rest from the daily urgencies and tensions and to gain a reflexive research posture. This posture can allow them to reflect on their practices and deconstruct, rebuild, evaluate and redefine them, thus becoming more aware of their own educational style and frameworks, and of what produces educational effects in the contexts in which they operate. It is evident, hence, the necessity – now recognized as indispensable – to combine initial (school and university) training and experiential learning that marks the entrance of new educators into workplaces with in-service training. Team meetings, vocational training courses, supervision and pedagogical counseling are currently the main contexts for continuing education. In such contexts “second-level practices”, specifically aimed at the “training of trainers”, take place. These practices aim at structuring learning environments geared to implementing the skills of educators, understanding and supporting “first level” educational processes, to shaping teaching and learning practices from a time and space distance, and to encouraging the development of new perspectives of thought and action. But what is the relation between what happens every day in educational services and schools and in “second-level” contexts? How is it possible to translate the awareness and learning developed during counseling and supervision into daily education experiences? Asking these questions means questioning what favors or, vice versa, obstructs transitions between learning contexts with quite different characteristics, without simply assuming that each learning can be automatically translated from one context to another. Also to remember is that services and schools often tend to play routines, organizational clichés and consolidated procedures, even though these have proved inadequate. The risk is that practitioners, once they leave the counseling and supervisory settings, are once again entrapped in the entanglements of institutional mechanisms. Learning is also a contingent, unstable and changing phenomenon, embedded in a peculiar ecology of relationships. It must be re-contextualized every time, as it does not correspond to a mental set that can be transferred as is to another environment, as if it were an abstract program that can be run anywhere and under any circumstance, regardless of the specific social and material configurations at play. The point, then, is to understand how the learning developed in a given context – in this case, in counseling and supervision – can be translated into situations other than those in which they originated. Starting from these premises, this contribution intends to critically address the issue of the “translation” of the learning achieved during “second-level” training course to a “first-level” context, on a theoretical and methodological level. We will explore this problem by referring to reflective and sociomaterial approaches, showing how different epistemological frameworks lead to somewhat heterogeneous outcomes in defining and treating the issue under scrutiny. Finally, particular attention will be given to the ways in which the theories of complexity in the pedagogical field address the issues discussed