Rendere visibile l’apprendimento: il volontariato davanti alla sfida delle competenze

[Autom. eng. transl.] The solicitation for comparison with the theme of skills has oriented the world of volunteering towards the identification of multiple practices and experiments aimed at identifying, highlighting, enhancing and in some cases evaluating or certifying the skills acquired during the voluntary experience, both at the beginning, during and at the end of it through ad hoc practices and not according to the standards developed for formal education and training (even if, not infrequently, the declared purpose of the systems for validating skills in volunteering is its valorization in the world of work). In Chapter 6, entitled "Making learning visible: volunteering in the face of the skills challenge", Emanuele Serrelli presents some projects and initiatives in this direction. These initiatives have the common problem of selecting the skills most relevant to volunteering, such as social and civic ones, soft skills, life skills, or even the "eight key skills for lifelong learning", or more elaborate models built ad hoc . At the methodological level, they propose toolkits and sets of assessment and self-assessment tools containing skills assessments, behavioral checklists and questionnaires, narrative tools often used in an (auto)biographical perspective, as well as portfolio-inspired tools. Certain reference figures are often mentioned as central, or even operators specialized in accompanying the emergence of skills, on whose training some guidelines are provided. Despite all this work, the official sites, apps and platforms developed by these projects are often no longer reachable shortly after their conclusion. Certainly, many of the causes of this transience can be attributed to the persistent lack of a national and international Identification, Evaluation and Certification System which has been under construction for many years. Perhaps the fragility of the proposed projects and systems also derives from peculiarities of the world of volunteering: despite the experiments, the "morphogenetic" process of constant and "system-wide" attention to skills is still in progress.