Abstract: Today, as never before, pedagogy is committed to a tricky and challenging role. To accompany today’s man and woman along the path towards the change between continuity and discontinuity, in a lifelong and lifewide perspective. To provide them with cognitive, emotional and operational means in order to recalibrate and redesign their own projects of development against unknown, sometimes even radical, changes.

If we consider today’s political, social and economic conjuncture, which made the work become its Achilles heel, pedagogy of work is entrusted with a far more difficult challenge. That is to make an epistemological reflection and to concretely redesign theories and practices of lifelong learning and guidance to and at work, as Laborem Exercens said talking about “permanent truth” of the humanity.

So, the pedagogy of work, in collaboration with other sciences, has to face the difficult gamble, on the one hand, to teach young generations a new culture of work and of “career construction”, in terms of scenarios, knowledge, expertise; on the other, to teach adults to reconstruct and to enhance their own project of professional development, between stasis and change.

Thus, training and guidance to and at work are of a high pedagogical caliber in the contemporary complex society, where a high level of engagement and responsibility is required, in order to “leading to system the education for the culture of work and for the self-entrepreneurship” (Linee guida per l’orientamento permanente, 2014) and to becoming recursive lifelong according to the different formative steps.

Together with the problems related to the “lack of work”, to the school-work alternance, to unemployment, to employability, etc, a pedagogy of work, characterised by a comprehensive nature and by a “Gardnerian” disciplinary habitus, has also to consider the important matter concerning the epistemological reflection which might reconstruct the interpretative frames of sense, meaning and values of work. A reflection of this kind is in fact the principal condition to avoid the effects of the heavy alienation of man and, at the contrary, to promote competences of direct control, awareness and responsibility about one’s professional choice, expanding personal competences of self-monitoring and of existential guidance.

In this multitude of variables and possibilities for realisation of this task, the pedagogy of work, first as a curricular science and then as telos of a formative culture based on the emancipation of the subject, may follow three distinctive axes. These are the three guidelines that, today more than ever before, characterise the mission of experienced-based knowledge and know-how and that mediate between the adherence to reality and the tension toutopia: to produce research, to communicate the change through a didactic approach, to promote personal and communitarian engagement seen as the capacity to build new strategies and guidance for spreading know-how within the society, through processes of communication, of management, of “engagement”.

 

Key words: adult education, work, guidance