FORMENTI LAURA

Full Professor of General and Social Pedagogy, Laura teaches Family Pedagogy and Family Counselling at the Department of Human Sciences for Education, where she also coordinates the Research Workshop “Pe.Tra.Lab” (a Pedagogy for Transformations in Work). She is the President of the Italian Society of Universities for Lifelong Learning (RUIAP): a consortium of 33 universities that invest on new policies and practices for lifelong learning in HE.

Trained as a systemic family therapist and expert of complexity theories, especially in their epistemologic and operative dimensions, Laura developed her own model of intervention within human systems, that overcomes the dominant individualistic cumulative view of knowledge as “possession”, to explore its dialogic, interactional and transformative dimensions.

Since 1992, she has been active in the international arena of Adult Education and Learning; she is active in several groups, networks and societies, such as the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (of which she has been the Chairperson from 2014 to 2019), and Joint Convenor of the “Life History and Biography” research network, LHBN (together with Linden West and Alan Bainbridge, Canterbury Christ Church University). She started with others the European Conference for Qualitative Inquiry – ECQI and the Asiatic (South Korea) Biography, Lifelong Learning and Culture, IBLLC. 

In 2019, Laura was awarded the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE)’s Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education for the book “Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education. A dialogue”, written with Linden West and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Laura is presently working on several research projects on empowering professionals of education in Residential Child Care (Erasmus Plus KA2 ERRCI, Turku, FI, p.i. Eeva Timonen-Kallio); on using collaborative and arts-based methodologies in exploring themes of social justice in museums (Feminist Workshop, Victoria, BC, 2017-2020, p.i. Darlene Clover); on senso-biographic methods in searching migrants’ experience (ALSOS, 2018-2020) and the relationship with a territory (Sensotra, ERC 2017-2021).