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72
Part One
Learning, planning and evaluation
on to reach “self-awareness” and it entails an educational experience
that involves not only the intellectual but also the socio-emotional
growth of the students.
In the mid-90s, PEI, the Service Charter, and later the POF (
Piano
dell’Offerta Formativa
- Plan of Educational Offer) are the answers that
the Italian school undertake with regard to the complexity of knowl-
edge, the increasingly higher transparency and quality responses ex-
pressed by citizens, the demand of many teachers to become more
actively involved as participants in the educational pathways they in-
tend to implement. The PEI, and later the POF, are the means by
which the didactic autonomy of the individual schools, on the way
to become decision makers themselves and not just executive bodies
of decisions taken by central authorities, and ind a concrete dimen-
sion in the formulation and publication of the academic offer. The
teachers’ college assumes a more collective identity and can retrieve
a higher capacity of research and experimentation opening itself to
the territory, either to understand their needs or to advertise the con-
tents of the school’s educational proposal.
The concept of
curriculum
is expanded; for teachers the shift from
empirical teaching to a more rigorous and scientiic one implies a
responsibility to choose from one of the following theoretical refer-
ence models:
a) The teaching theory;
b)The learning theory;
c) The projection technologies;
d)The internal epistemology of the rules.
The curriculummust select and deine (but not require) the reference
content, it must indicate the minimum and maximum times for their
realisation, deine the organisation criteria of the content and the for-
mative experience strategies, deine the goals, identify the methods
and criteria for the appreciation of the educational and cultural de-
velopment.
The curriculum acquires a strategic meaning in relation to the edu-
cation of new generations. The elaboration and fulilment of the cur-
riculummust favour a mixed pattern of implementation, not only the
bottom up or the top down
type; the college is delegated to the prepara-
tion of the choices on the content, methods, processing and various
forms of evaluation and documentation. The curriculum of a school