Scommettere sulle competenze degli educatori. Un’esperienza di formazione ai formatori sul leaving care

By means of what competences educators can build up (and maintain) dissemination and awareness raising context to support care leavers ageing out of care? Notwithstanding the care leavers’ support is a central issue of family education, the training offered by academic and professional channels is still rather limited. Filling this gap and drawing on a recent national experience of training of trainers as transformative learning, this contribution analyzes educators’ competences required by the literature, comparing them with what emerged in the fieldwork. Particularly, the paper focuses on the competences of reading the context as a field, of recognizing their own theories and implicit premises and on the competence of building contexts of participation for care leavers and their families. In the discussion, these competences are analyzed by means of epistemological clues and are proposed as criteria for self-evaluation. In the Conclusions, several practical implications are proposed to build up and legitimize a community of practices that focuses on the capacity of educators to support different transitions, “germinating” reflections, tools, and innovative transformative solutions.