Abstract:

Being a tutor requires knowledge, skills and competences able to produce effective practices.
Inside the learning course of students with special needs, this role implies the mediation of relationships and actions useful to the inclusion (Ianes, 2005) of the individual in the scholastic and social context (Novak, 2001). Given the fact that each student presents unique specificities, the knowledge the tutor needs to dispose of is not standardized.
Here thinking of these professionals’ training leads to the Lifelong Learning as a process in which personal experiences concur to the collective reconstruction of the proposed knowledge, in order to be customized to the individual working realities.
The knowledge and know to be shift into the know how even through a shared mediation of strategies, meant as an elective moment for the constitution of a spendable and effective professional identity.
Virtual learning and specific tools offer the challenge to structure learning contexts where the CoA spontaneously turn into CoP, thus satisfying explicit needs and non, by means of blended solutions inserted in post-lauream courses.
This research investigates the ways in which the learning in blended modality is functional to the widened knowledge development, how it promotes the effective practices sharing, mediated by the self-evaluation process and tested in real working contexts.
The sample is given by a class of 54 teachers and one e-tutor attending a postgraduate course in student with special needs.
This work aims at demonstrating through data support that during the learning process, teachers make use of the virtual space to create new knowledge, given their own professional experiences and in light of the knowledge acquired.
Following the institutional course sustained by the e-tutor’s presence, the virtual environment is being enriched by new inputs forwarded by the teachers themselves and oriented to the recognition of the other participants’ practices, thus becoming a training tool targeted on the need, perceived to be functional to the development of abilities and competences spendable from the very beginning. With the confrontation mediated by case narration, each training teacher can have access to a data base and to a store of practices which /whose incorporated elements can be manipulated step by step, in quest of new practices functional to the specific needs. This results in a learning “mediated” in the field, where the latter is given by the virtual space where minds build up new operational contexts through the metabolization of others’ experiences. The case narration (Kaneklin, 2010) asks the training group for explicit knowledge destructuring processes, comparison and evaluation of the latter and last, re-organization of this knowledge in a way that it becomes functional to the individual case.
The exchange of veritable material makes then the learning path in existence an element that can set in itinere feasibility and validity judgments, by constituting also an ever implementable repository.
The model proposed is supposed to be used in learning contexts where the re-elaboration of knowledge through the creation of practices demands spaces in which a reasoned confrontation breaks away from those space and time limits proper of standard learning courses, in order to insert itself in self-generating permanent learning courses.

Keywords:

Blended education, training for teachers.