The vertical curriculum in the lifelong learning perspective

Resumen

The paper considers the concept of the vertical curriculum in the lifelong learning conception. The concept of vertical curriculum introduces an issue that marks a discontinuity with transformative values in pedagogical debate and teaching practice. The perspective of lifelong learning modifies and integrates the educational project precisely on the basis of a different temporal conception, not only on the adjustment of organizational structures but on the ecology of development and learning understood as a vital process. In this sense, schools must confront the scientifically proven thesis that people continue to learn and transform throughout their lives and must at the same time make this idea pedagogically sustainable. From this point of view, the reference map comes to be supplemented with the concepts of mental plasticity and pervasiveness of knowledge, from which some key criteria for learning-to-learn-oriented design, among others, can be derived. The vertical curriculum represents a cultural artifact, progressive and recursive, capable of promoting training in complexity, understood in this part as a process that is related to the dimension of reflexivity and strategic competencies: a process that lasts throughout the life cycle and allows for the construction of meanings from experience, in a perspective of critical consciousness, global citizenship and planetary responsibility.