The Curriculum as a Professionalising Infrastructure: University Innovation and Continuing Education

In the contemporary debate on the quality of higher education, the university curriculum can no longer be understood merely as an arrangement of courses, credits and learning objectives. Rather, it constitutes a pedagogical and professionalising infrastructure through which universities organise knowledge, learning experiences, didactic mediations and trajectories of professional development. This perspective makes it possible to interpret individual courses not as isolated units, but as formative devices in which the general aims of a degree programme are translated into teaching practices, learning environments and competences that students can actually experience. This contribution takes as a case study the course “Foundations of Pedagogy for Inclusion”, offered within the Degree Programme in Adult Education and Continuing Training at the University of Palermo, with the aim of investigating the relationship between teaching innovation, lifelong learning and educational professionalisation. The interpretative hypothesis is that the quality of a university curriculum depends not only on the coherence of its overall architecture, but also on the capacity of individual courses to act as spaces of mediation between theoretical knowledge, educational design, didactic accessibility and the development of professional competences. The analysis focuses on three interdependent dimensions: the methodological configuration of the course, understood as the intentional organisation of contents, activities and reflective processes; didactic accessibility, considered as an ordinary condition for participation rather than as a subsequent adaptation; and digital mediation, interpreted as a resource for expanding opportunities for interaction, flexibility, continuity and personalisation of the learning experience. The case allows for a discussion of the role of university teaching in constructing educational professionalities capable of operating in the fields of adult education and continuing training. It leads to a conception of the curriculum as a living infrastructure, in which innovation does not lie solely in the institutional design of the degree programme, but in the capacity of individual courses to generate coherent, accessible and professionalising formative experiences.