Innovation

Code:

OP118

Acronym:

INOV

Instance: 2014/2015 - 1S

Active?	Yes
Responsible unit:	Education Sciences
Course/CS Responsible:	Master Degree in Educational Sciences

Cycles of Study/Courses

Acronym	No. of Students	Study Plan	Curricular Years	Credits UCN	Credits ECTS	Contact hours	Total Time
MCED	12	Official Curricular Structure	1	-	6	49	162

Teaching language

Portuguese

Objectives

Acquisition of knowledge and skills in order to solve, in a rigorous, founded and critical way, theoretical and practical problems in the domains of Lifelong Career Guidance, Recognition and Validation of Experiential Learning, Adult Education and Lifelong Learning.
Assuming a theoretical status, a critical intention, a multidisciplinary extent and a situated approach (founded on a perspective), this discipline aims the following specific objectives/learning outcomes:
(a) Acquisition of competencies and instruments – both theoretical and methodological – and of analytical categories able to function as the basis of a critical point of view capable of questioning and evolving beyond mere common sense – including professional common sense – on recognition and validation of experiential learning devices;
(b) Make use of a double framework – cultural as well as political – built on symbolic and life choice dimensions, respectively so that such devices can be framed

Learning outcomes and competences

Lifelong guidance and learning. Evolutionary tension and social functions. Adult education: the social construction of a tradition.
Lifelong guidance: from choice to the construction of direction/meaning for the relation with learning/work. The politics of vocation.
Psychosocial attributes of experience and learning. Autobiographical learning. Experience, refection/integration/abstraction, relationship, context and social dynamics.
Experiential learning and the politics of recognition. Autobiographical injunction. Life stories and narratives: gramatisation. Hypomnemata and experience meaning construction.
Prior learning recognition and validation devices:( bilan de compétences, portfolios, life stories, skills assessment, observation, declarative methods…).
7 heuristic axes for the construction of research/work objects in the realm experiential learning: Individuation/individualisation; uncertainty/insecurity; trust crisis; rupture with tradition; rationalisation, technicisation and bureaucratisation of life; community deficit; assimilation of the incalculable by the calculable.

Working method

Presencial

Pre-requirements (prior knowledge) and co-requirements (common knowledge)

The contents of this curricular unit syllabus were selected under the criterium of enabling the accomplishment of its learning outcomes. In this sense, all content components are far from being considered a given: experiential learning, its recognition and validation devices, lifelong career guidance, lifelong learning or adult education – to only mention some of the most representative ones – are analysed, questioned, deconstructed, contextualized, inscribed in their psychological dimensions, situated in their social functions (both explicit and implicit) and founded on literature. Such approaches discourage naturalisation, hypostatisation or the resource to authority arguments. Conditions are then created, throughout the semester, to contribute gradually to enable students for an autonomous, rigorous and sustainable solving of conceptual and practical problems in the domain of issues under the scope of this subject.

Program

Teaching methodologies are expository, lecture-type, stimulating a systematic students participation, which are explicitly motivated to interact, including by means of the teacher’s initiative. This modus operandi is negotiated with the students from the 1st class, motivating them and raising awareness of the enrichment that results from dialogue and perspectives interaction between students and with the teacher. Considering that the responsibility of class activities is part of the teacher’s role rather than the students’ one, it should not be inferred that this teaching methodology might be passive de facto.
In the context of university learning, and foremost in post-graduation programmes, even during silence moments, when the teacher’s discourse occupies part of the time of class activities, students are stimulated to assume an active attitude, being available and focused in critical appreciating the expressed contents and initiating interventions, reflections and debates. Their stance is effectively active at the level of cognitive functioning, mobilizing every sort of intellectual resources. Summative evaluation intends to reach integration objectives and is materialized by means of writing an in situ mini-essay based on a stimulus provided by the teacher.

Mandatory literature

Coimbra, J.L., Parada, F., & Imaginário, L. ; Formação ao longo da vida e gestão da carreira

Comments from the literature

Coimbra, J.L., Parada, F., & Imaginário, L. (2001). Formação ao longo da vida e gestão da carreira. Lisboa: Direcção-Geral do Emprego e Formação Profissional/Ministério do Trabalho e da Solidariedade.

Kolb, A.Y., & Kolb, D.A. (2012). Experiential learning theory. In N.M. Seel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. New York, NY: Springer.

Bragança, Â., Castro, J.M., & Coimbra, J.L. (2012). Como sobreviver à aprendizagem ao longo da vida como blame policies do mundo moderno. Revista Portuguesa de Investigação Educacional, 10, 243-257.

Watts, A.G., & McNair, S. (2013). Towards a strategy for lifelong guidance to support lifelong learning and work. In D. C. A. Bradshaw (Ed.), Bringing learning to life: The learning revolution, the economy and the individual. Routledge Library Editions: Education.

Halttunen, T., Koivisto M., & Billett S. (2014). Promoting and recognising lifelong learning: Introduction. In T. Halttunen, M. Koivisto & S. Billett (Eds.), Promoting, assessing, recognizing and certifying lifelong learning. Springer Netherlands.

Teaching methods and learning activities

From our point of view, the adopted teaching methodology appears to be an adequate option considering the curricular unit objectives. These are focused on the development of competencies of theoretical and practical problems conceptualization under this subject’s scope complying with autonomy, rigor, critical sense and foundation on research literature criteria. The way expository classes allow such a result within students justifies that the theoretical-methodological social learning (Bandura, 1986; 2011) model might be invoked. In fact, modelling and instruction (providing the structuring rule) components play a central role in this process. The first one refers to the teacher’s role which aims to perform a competent model by means of an in situ production of a discourse with the already mentioned features fostering the students exposition to the experience of observation, confrontation and interaction with adequate modes of autonomous reasoning, of developing, in a rigorous way, the use of concepts and thought operations, of clarifying and critically judging different reflection dimensions and of demonstrating how to make use of theoretical and empirical literature so that they might argue about the validity of classroom enunciations. The second one corresponds to providing the rules able to structure a thinking with such predicates. It entails a metadiscourse that takes the reflection and explicitation of reasoning and problem solving as main object, and that appeals to illustration and justification through examples and counterexamples. The intention is to overcome risks of possible imitation and mimicry situations, promoting the internalization of processes, mechanisms, rules and generative principles that make it possible a students’s personal thinking, even unprecedented in many aspects of its expression form and content. The final acquisition could be formulated – both in literal and metaphorical senses – as the development of a ‘cognitive grammar’ able to produce outcomes in accordance with the mentioned criteria. By following this methodological guidance – with strong andragogic components of a process nature, although not exclusively -, one seeks to avoid reductant although frequent practices exclusively focused on contents overlooking their form and adjective components, leading to mere mechanisms of information and knowledge transmission.
In what respects complexity as an indicator of learning quality, it depends mostly on social-cognitive conflict originated from interactions between students and between these and the teacher. First of all involving peers, considering the balance between homogeneity (bonding) and a relative degree of diversity (bridging) in students groups, creating the optimal point of interaction between close but distinct levels of social-cognitive complexity of their functioning, being that the more complex tend to attract and unbalance, and foster the developmental transition of the ‘less complex’ ones. The teacher plays a stimulation and guidance of activities role and of creating the necessary conditions under which such conflicts may occur.

Evaluation Type

Distributed evaluation without final exam

Assessment Components

designation	Weight (%)
Trabalho escrito	100,00
Total:	100,00

Calculation formula of final grade

100%