Professional awareness of Italian educators in initial undergraduate training

The aim of the research presented here is to investigate the degree of professional awareness (Fabbri & Rossi, 2009) of the students of the three-year degree course in Scienze dell’Educazione e della Formazione (Educational Sciences) of the University of Catania through the development of a specially developed investigation tool, the Professional Educator Awareness Scale (PEAS). This tool is a structured questionnaire, consisting of 20 items that aim to distinguish with a high degree of proximity the professional figure of the educator from other social professions (psychologist, teacher, pedagogist, and cultural mediator). The item descriptors of the professional figures were constructed starting from the competences defined in the Atlas of Professions (Luciano, 2013), and in the reference legislation, in order to detect the students’ awareness (Leontiev, 1978) of both their future work and the roles of the different educational professions. After a preliminary presentation of the Italian context regarding the roles and training of educational professionals—specifically the sociopedagogical educator—the chapter presents the data related to the validation of the investigation tool and the results of the first administration on a sample of 234 students from the University of Catania.