Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Strategic Competences and Teacher Professionalisation

This contribution intends to place the issue of teachers’ professionalisation within the framework of the learning society paradigm and the lifelong learning strategy. In fact, the profound and accelerated transformations that run through society today require each person to acquire and develop, throughout their lives, certain strategic competences that are functional to being a lifelong learner, including the ability of learning to learn. Vocational education and training must also be placed in this perspective, as must the education of the teachers themselves who work in this system. This requires a reorientation of the training curricula towards the development of the reflective capacity, which makes it possible to attribute meaning and value to all of life’s experiences. A measure that has proved effective in this regard is the adoption of methods based on the biographical-narrative approach and the experiential approach, which includes the enhancement of reflective workshop and internship experiences.