Experience-based learning, apprendimento dall’esperienza e sfide femministe. Supportare lo sviluppo dell’identità professionale attraverso pratiche riflessive collettive

The article presents findings from an intervention research designed to support undergraduate female students and educators of early childhood education and care services to reflect critically on the relationships between gender, career expectations, trajectories of professional development and work practices. The research project involved forty-four female students of the third year of the degree in education sciences that, in the academic year 2017-2018, followed a laboratory entitled Supporting Development of Professional Identity, and fifty-three female educators of the early childhood care and education services who participated into training activities promoted by a Lombard social cooperative. The goals were: (1) to develop knowledge and insight on what it means to be a professional practitioner in the education sector; (2) to support trajectories of professional development from a gender perspective; (3) to help participants become aware and question taken-for-granted and culturally assimilated assumptions about professional practices, identity, and role of the educator; In the laboratory path, were adopted action methodologies based, respectively, on experience-based learning (Andresen, Boud & Cohen, 2000; Boud, Keogh & Walker, 2013), learning from experience (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Lave & Wenger, 1991; O’Neil & Marsick, 2009), and post-structuralist feminist perspective (Francis & Skelton, 2005; Gherardi & Poggio, 2006). The aim is to present a methodological framework useful to elaborate, within project-based paths, models of collective action to promote individual and organizational learning through the construction of reflective knowledge.