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The competences theoretical model develops the “reflective practitioner” one and vice versa. Competence, seen as a conceptual construction and method, provides regulation in “reflective practitioner” in general, and more so, if the professional works in the field of education and guidance.
As described in theoretical framework, the paradigmatic construction of competence can be defined as a mix of resources, specific to each individual, made of:
- Knowledge (formal or informal, systematically and local);
- Appropriate action according to this knowledge (how to apply the knowledge in practice);
- Personal characteristics and behaviours (being able and willing to act in the appropriate way in different situations and contexts; but also being able to become and re-invent oneself (Boutinet, 2004).
A mix that is the basis of each effective professional service. The competence is the “raw material” that is “processed” in the “workshop” of the social professions.
As a method, the paradigm of competence introduces:
- a new general point of view on the issues concerning the training, guidance, management and development of human resources;
- a new point of view and useful approach based on the centrality of the subject;
- the enhancement and reconstruction of the experience (of the ways, forms and meanings that it takes);
- the logic of empowerment and development of the individual capacity to plan.
The subject in the centre. In the competence approach, the individual is the protagonist, weaving his/her own tissue of life course on his/her loom. On the epistemological level of the definition of the profession, it means overcoming the model of technical rationality; while on the level of work, it overcomes the Fordist-Taylorist mantra based on the trilogy of machine-job-execution where the person does not appear except as a body and as a terminal aphasic (Virno, 2001) and not as a thinking machine. Here, however, in view of the competence, the person is an active and proactive subject who holds the reins of their own projects, with the aim to expand the space of possibilities within which to invest its wealth of resources.
History and biography. A person who misses a history, a biography or the awareness of having one, is in a “scotomization process”, a being with no past, no present and no future. He/she lives in suspense, like in a kind of a-social and timeless sphere. In the competence approach, one’s life story plays an essential role: one recovers the threads from the past, no matter how strong or subtle, and binds them to todays’ and future weaving work. All this is made possible by the fact that the biography is the “black box” which records the traces of the experience. The biographical approach, typical of the approaches by competence, is the key. It helps us reconstruct the structure of a person’s competences through the reconstruction of the ways of their acquisition, their development and their management in the context of the value systems of reference of individuals (Alberici & Serreri, 2009).
The project and the competence. Competences, as a mix of resources called into action by an individual, contain by themselves an anticipative and predictive value of the individual’s own success in his/her work. A value that is not contained by any of the single resources on their own, neither as a result of a simple addition of the resources (as a stock). The quantity and the quality of fundamental systematic knowledge and specific professional procedures that teachers master, on their own, are no guarantee for the person being a good teacher. In other words, more than the project in itself (that is always present at all levels in the competence approach), what matters is to develop a “conduct adapted to project” (Boutinet, 1999). That means being able to make things clear in your discursive scenario; know how to be in the situation; able to move in the complexity and turbulence; knowing how to cope with the unexpected; be able to develop their professional and personal self-according to a perspective view. Because concepts such as work, education, social actor, innovation, change, identity, crisis and attribution of meaning are numerous profiles of complicity and kinship with design concepts and “conduct in the project.”
In the last two decades, the concept of ‘individual project’ and of ‘individual in transition’ has emerged in the theories on ‘Lifelong learning’ and ‘Lifelong Guidance’. These are two key concepts for thinking in individual solutions, like those that should be privileged for the NEETS, paths that define both their meanderings (v. Today the turbulence of the crisis or, more generally, the process of flexibility and / or insecurity) and their goals: in the double form of ‘”domestication” of the present moment and anticipation of a future desired. In a form that is both “autopoietic” (the individual is the author and actuator of their project) and “praxis” (which concerns the praxis) and inspired to action based on self-regulation of action by the individual.
The reflective rationality paradigm nurtured by the epistemological construction on competences as a method, is what this project defines a cornerstone of the social and educational operator’s training. Foremost when he/she is active in the field of the “pure” NEETS, imprisoned in what we called already a bubble in a state of “social withdrawal” (out from education, training and work-free motivation to resume the study or training and get back into the labour market: without history and without a project).