Author(s):
Albuquerque, Alexandra
Date: 2012
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/2975
Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
Subject(s): Education
Description
23rd SPACE AGM and Conference from 9 to 12 May 2012
Conference theme: The Role of Professional Higher Education: Responsibility and Reflection
Venue: Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences, Mikkeli, Finland Such output demands a very effective and complex process, involves several actors
and environments and can be more or less formal. Traditionally, education has been
divided into 3 main types - formal, non-formal and informal – and each of them has
been defined and contextualized in different ways by several researchers.
Nevertheless, in the process of education of students of the knowledge society of 21st
century, the three types overlap quite often and play different roles in the process of
lifelong learning.
This paper aims at presenting some environments of non-formal education, in a formal
Higher Education Institution (HEI), in which undergraduated students from different
programs and semesters can acquire crucial skills and knowledge on intercultural and
interpersonal relations, entrepreneurship and other.
The non-formal environment examples are deeply linked to the management of
international students’ mobility by the International Office of a HEI, which greatly
depends on the cooperation of in-house students in a non-formal learning context.
Being the Bologna Diplomas mainly a 6-semester education program, in some cases
with no placement embedded, students are more and more looking for opportunities to
acquire more and more context-based knowledge and skills to help them feel prepared
for the global society.
In fact, Higher Education can become a fundamental (non)formal ground in which
young people get a hold of skills and knowledge complementary to and/ or applied from
the formal education in classes, which is needed to understand global problems and
also important for their personal development.