Almudena Navas Saurin

Twenty Years of Basic Vocational Education Provision in Spain: Changes and Trends

Our contribution attempts to review basic vocational education pro- grammes in Spain over the past 25 years. We intend to compare the evolution of these programmes in terms of conception and conditions of delivery in order to find out how different they are as skill-formation and remedial systems, as well as analysing how different political views have an impact upon such provision. We will focus on the current programmes in two regions in Spain where tourism is the main economic strength and source of employment. The authors have been work- ing on several research projects investigating these issues since the late 1990s and we are currently working on two of them.

Educated for migration? Blind spots around labor market conditions, competence building, and international mobility

Young European graduates are crossing borders to work abroad more often than in the past. This trend is particularly evident in Southern Europe, where recent economic downturn has significantly diminished professional opportunities and career prospects. This study will investigate Spain, a country where unemployment has increased dramatically since 2008, as a case study to examine recent graduate’s experiences to develop a professional career in Germany. In particular, this study will draw upon various sources: official statistics; review literature; and education and training policies throughout the European Union. The investigation features an interview with Spanish graduates working in Germany to offer insight into the experiences of perhaps the best-prepared generation of the Spanish workforce. Our results indicate that young Spaniards, leaving the country to work out of necessity rather than choice, learn through the benefits and challenges of a career abroad. We finish our article by discussing the notions of education, competencies and adaptation, and how citizen and professional identities are redefined after the experience of working abroad.

Promoting Social and Political Change Through Pedagogy: Lorenzo Milani and the Barbiana School (Italy 1954–1967)

This chapter describes the curriculum and pedagogy implemented at Barbiana, a small school in a remote and mountainous place in Italy. Still revered in Europe as one of the most interesting innovative teaching experiences, the school started in 1954 when Lorenzo Milani, a Catholic priest committed to work with the poor who had run an afterschool program in a working-class parish in an industrial city close to Florence, was sent to this location because of his leftist views. Milani believed that schools were class-based institutions that benefited bourgeois children and that excluded working-class and farmworker students. To reverse this situation, Milani contended that education for these students should focus on mastering the Italian language since, he argued, it was the lack of such mastery that prevented poor people from articulating their social demands. At Barbiana, Milani brought this belief to life by opening a school that placed language at the core of the curriculum and where he engaged students in the critical reading of their own social realities and their own process of schooling. The school was closed in 1967 after Milani’s premature death.

Comprehensive education boundaries and remedies on the edges of the Spanish educational system

Throughout the history of education different conceptions have been developed about the role and the function that education has in society as a whole. Such conceptions have been constructed around different discourses that show underlying social conflicts. The different educational practices acquire their legitimacy through such discourses, which organize the action of the subjects participating in them. In the research works that have been developed from the University of Valencia over the period 1994 to 20141, discursive keys through which educators of comprehensive measures legitimate their action have been identified. In those analyses a notion of discourse as the structure of arguments and justifications articulated around a rationale that gives meaning and allows organization of reality in a given socio-historical context with participation of different subjects was assumed.