Abstract:

A correct and meaningful teen-ager education should aim to guarantee a great mastery of oneself and to help teenagers develop an autonomous and responsible personality. Therefore, recognizing their own limits and responsibilities, teenagers are able to make choices suitable to their own possibilities and fit for the context in which it develops his where they live.

The vocational development consists of helping the pupil to move his/her first footsteps in the real exercise of freedom, respecting the different stages of his/her development, so that he/she consistently act according to ethical principles and progresses in the correct direction to find an access to new degrees of freedom and responsibility.

In the Academic Years 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 six high school teacher councils of year 4 classes in Palermo have been involved in the project Aracne Due. Thanks to the collaboration of experts and researchers, they have experimented a vocational development training, through the learning of the disciplinary contents, in order to develop students’ essential skills to formulate a career choice.
The didactic experimentation has considered a plurality of coordinated actions and it has allowed the integration between school and university to promote interventions aimed at developping vocational maturity of young people and the acquisition of the necessary prerequisites to face university studies.

The present contribution shows the project made by the high school of Humanities "Altavilla", in Palermo, about the way the teachers can develop the ability of planning and the career choice of their pupils, starting from the disciplinary contents taught in the last year of the high school.
Among the various methodologies for the development career maturity, at the end of adolescence, we have been proposed the "Activation du Développement Vocationnel et Personnel" (ADVP) conceived at the University of Laval (Québec, Canada) which has received different applications in educational field in Europe. This methodology has been adopted because it allows teachers to run innovative didactic interventions in the form of problems related to the experience of the students and, at the same time, it involved all school disciplines.

The educational-didactic project has been planned with the intent of provoking some professional improvements in the teachers and to contribute to the vocational maturity in the pupils of the last years of secondary school, 1st grade. During the Academic Year 2011-12 the “Altavilla” school teachers have created and validated 6 exercises that have involved the students for a total of 40 hours. The disciplines involved are Latin, Mathematics, Physics and History of the art.

Keywords:

Vocational development, ADVP methodology, didatic.