The New – or rediscovered – Horizons of Education

ARTICLE BY PATRIZIA SANGALLI – Published in HBR column “Formatori&Formazione” issue of May 2022

Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed the emergence of training in numerous organisational contexts and, at the same time, a significant broadening of its horizon as a discipline and set of activities aimed at developing knowledge, skills and abilities. In more recent years, however, the training scene has been confronted with significant new orientations and needs. The characteristics that the now well-known acronym V.U.C.A. has brought to the fore: Volatility, Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity are part of everyday life and, also because of the pandemic events that have involved us, have had a major influence on individuals and organisations.

Certainly, we have witnessed an important diluge of digital in education, a phenomenon enthusiastically welcomed by many, which has opened up possible new horizons. However, this is not the direction of my reflection. Instead, I would like to focus attention not so much on how tools may change and evolve, but rather on how a strong and clear direction is emerging to evolve the principle and meaning of the training act and the learning process. The so-called liquid society, or the society of ‘doing’, is characterised by the frenetic focus on everything that makes it possible to appear, on what quickly leads to one result, and even more quickly calls up another, and yet another. The tension for results can only refer to further tension for results in a crescendo that is well known to all and that has led to confusing means with ends, losing sight of an essential aspect that belongs to us: the sense of ulteriority.

The pandemic experience, but not only it, has helped to bring this drive into sharper focus: forced isolation, the consequent sense of loneliness, fears for the future, and a sense of powerlessness have awakened a different awareness: our life cannot be traced back only to the merry-go-round of performance, it needs something else, it needs to have and understand meaning. Another phenomenon exemplifying this emergence of new needs is the so-called ‘Great Resignation‘: resignation from work as it is conceived and proposed. The cases do not concern a company or a market segment, or even a specific country, it happens globally, and the motivations can be summarised in the need to give a different meaning to work, as an important aspect of one’s growth, but certainly not the only one.

In this scenario, training and learning assume strategic importance, returning to embody the oldest and most authentic meaning that concerns not only knowledge, or knowing how to do, but also and above all knowing how to be. The paradigm shift is already underway, moving from the transmission of theories/knowledge to the construction of knowledge, a perspective that rests on an important assumption: ‘subject-centredness’. Participants thus become the active protagonists of the intervention
training. The learning context becomes shared space and time, which the participants inhabit with their anxieties, affections and fatigues.

The training context opens up a space in which people become significantly involved also in relation to their own internal project that, by integrating into the group, leads to the activation of real change. In this space, affectivity flourishes, which in the learning process takes on nuances and changes that are essential for the construction of meaning. The power of being in relationship in the learning context represents the keystone of the new way of doing training. It is in the relationship and thanks to the relationship that facilitation and team coaching nurture awareness, trust and motivation to initiate change. It is in the relationship, finally, that difference becomes a fundamental condition for the construction of new meanings.

Another element that has been banished from learning contexts for decades are emotions The imperative was to learn to control them, to keep them out, as they are dysfunctional regardless. Well, we are finally emerging from a kind of cultural obscurantism with respect to emotions, whose valuable function is increasingly openly recognised. The new frontiers of learning and training cannot fail to consider how training in accepting, recognising and regulating emotions is a powerful lever for an authentic learning process that relies on curiosity, wonder and passion, which have always been the engine of evolution and progress.