I'm just elaborating a blog post for EPALE. What do you think?

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I'm just elaborating a blog post for EPALE. What do you...

Randolph Discussion started by Randolph 5 months ago

I am just preparing a summary of our project for publication on EPALE. The text is based on previous work of project partners.

Here is what I have so far. Your feedback is very welcome.

Title: Sustainability Skills in Adult Education - The 5P Competence Framework

The 5P Competences Project is a European partnership that brings together education and training providers, non-governmental organisations and municipalities from five European countries. These project partners are dedicated to advancing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) by developing a structured and well-defined competence framework and promoting its integration into adult education for sustainable development.

The competence framework is one of the main tools developed as part of the 5P Competences Project. It serves as a comprehensive guide for acquiring skills and competences relevant to sustainable development from a lifelong learning perspective. The framework was developed because traditional competence frameworks often are designed for formal learning, and therefore are inadequate for lifelong learning. Although learning objectives can be integrated well into catalogues describing skills and competences that are of general importance, they can be hardly referred to problems and concrete situations arising from everyday life. However, different to schools and universities, it is everyday life that is the primary cause for informal and non-formal learning of adults, whether this is for private or professional reasons.

In the first phase a Conceptual Frame of Reference has been developed, which brings together the ideas and concepts, theoretical elements and research methods adopted in order to develop the 5P framework. At the center lies the concept of "developmental tasks", the tasks and goals that individuals need to achieve over their lifetime. These developmental tasks are seen as important within the context of lifelong learning and informal education for sustainable development because they are essential for fostering competences related to sustainability, such as understanding the impact of actions on future generations, promoting fairness, and taking personal responsibility for creating a sustainable world.

The 5P Competences project has identified three main developmental tasks of overall importance for education for sustainable development:

Existence and Continuance of the World: This developmental task focuses on the importance of ensuring the future of one's own life, society, and future generations. It emphasizes responsible management of material resources to create a sustainable future for individuals and communities.
Social Cohesion and Justice: This task pertains to promoting social fairness, values, and fairness within society. It involves developing social values and a concept of social fairness, which is crucial for creating equitable and just communities.
Self-Efficacy and Active Engagement for Sustainability: The third developmental task revolves around self-empowerment and the belief in one's capacity to effect positive change.

In the next step we looked at different competence models, in order to identify the one most relevant with a view to building the competence framework.

We finally decided for the model of Heyse/Erpenbeck, which defines competences as “dispositions for self-organisation”. In this understanding competences are seen as the ability of a person to successfully master open, incalculable, complex, and dynamic situations in a self-organized way. In other words: competences are dispositions to organize oneself. They are conditions to adapt oneself to concrete situations and changing conditions by successfully adapting one’s strategies of behaviour. This understanding matches very well with the idea of lifelong learning, and informal learning in particular, because it focusses on the fact that individuals are defining the goals of their learning by themselves. Competences are – like informal learning, too – based on self-determination.

The following principles are crucial:

The development of competences is non-linear
Competences are reinforcing themselves (because acquiring new competences will lead to new experiences which again initiates the development of new competences)
Competences are dependent on factors inside the individuals and not from outside (environment)
Competences are dependent on internalized values
Competences are dependent on the development of a person and on his or her history.

In the next step we defined the 4 main dimensions of the competence framework, which pretty much reflect the categories of the EQF (European Qualification Framework for Lifelong Learning) and DQR (German Qualification Framework for Lifelong Learning), in spite of different terms used.

Personal competences (P) are dispositions within the individual leading to self-organized action. They encompass the ability to assess oneself, to reflect on oneself as a person and to develop own individual values, motivation and standpoints. This is as well affecting gifts, motivation, creativity and learning.
Social and communicative competences (S) are dispositions to collaborate with others in a self-organized, cooperative and communicative was. The behaviour of a person is orientated on groups and relationships to others in order to create shared action-plans to develop joined tasks and objectives. Social and communicative competences are important to put coordinated actions on a stable ground.
Domain and method related competences (F): These dispositions are the conditions for a self-organized, accurate, objective and domain-based problem solving. This is depending on professional and methodological knowledge and on the capability to develop this knowledge further in a creative way.
Activation and action competences (A) are dispositions to put the other competences into action. This means to integrate the personal, social-communicative and domain related competences of a person into his or her personal motives and endurance.

To be continued ...

Replies

Randolph Laureano: Maybe Fatma would be interested to join our group, and share with us findings and insights from their projects. 4 months ago

Thomas Eckert Maybe it is helpful to work out the differences between the competence-atlas developed in our project and the several lists of SD-Competences developed in other frameworks. This is something, we have not done but it would not be so much work to do it. 3 months ago