THE PRACTICUM: AN EXAMPLE OF CHANGES IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS IN THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION SPACE.

Summary - In this article I focus on changes in the roles of both students and teachers in the EHES. In particular, this article describes the experience at UNED, the largest university in Spain, of teaching the Practicum, a fl agship subject as a bridge between the present study plans and the future plans under the EHES. At UNED, the Practicum is organised on two levels: the fi rst Practicum aims to develop the observation skills of education professionals; the second level aims to develop intervention skills. In this article I explain the features of the products that the student has to prepare for the fi rst level of the Practicum, such as the Practice Plan, the observation diary, the report, and the portfolio. The article includes an explanation of the sense, limits and possibilities of evaluating the students’ skills and learning processes through the Portfolio. This new evaluation tool has been used for training refl ective education professionals since the 1980s in the North American education system and has now arrived in our university context under the European Union education guidelines. I maintain that the Portfolio may fulfi l different functions and adopt different formats, but the essential element is that it refl ects the students’ learning processes as well as the skills that the students develop. In the last part of the article, I provide the reader with a description of the elements that a good portfolio should include for this fi rst level of the Practicum.