FORMING AND TRANSFORMING: CRITICAL REFLECTION IN THE UNIVERSITY EDUCATION OF PROFESSIONALS

Objective: In universities, a key challenge is to integrate practical work knowledge with theoretical knowledge to adapt to the changing demands of the labor market and society. In this context, the objective is to explore how the integration of theory and practice in master's programs focused on formative professions can facilitate transformative learning, enabling students to develop critical and reflective competencies applicable in both professional and personal contexts. Theoretical Framework: The research is grounded in Habermas's theory of communicative action, transformative learning, and training-action-research approaches, addressing concepts such as critical reflexivity, self-formation, and the integration of practical and theoretical experiences. Method : A qualitative methodology with an action-research design, termed training-action-research, was adopted. Twenty-five students from a master's program in education participated. Data collection involved participant observation and practice analysis, focusing on critical reflection and rational dialogue about work and training experiences. Results and Discussion : The alternation between theory and practice facilitated the development of reflective and critical competencies in the students. The study highlights implications, identified relationships, discrepancies, and limitations. Research Implications : The results can enhance teacher training, promote continuous professional development, and implement reflective and critical practices in educational and professional settings. Originality / Value : The study presents an innovative approach to professional university education, emphasizing critical reflexivity and transformative self-formation, with potential impacts on teacher training and professional practice.


INTRODUCTION
In After detailing the context in which this device was implemented, it is explored how the pedagogical team articulated the modes of professionalization in the master's degree.These modalities are analyzed from a theoretical perspective and their implications are presented from the critical perspective that pedagogical engineering adopted.Through various examples, the operational dimensions of this engineering are illustrated, highlighting the importance of theoretical and practical knowledge and the alternation between internships and reflective analysis.Finally, the contributions and limitations of this case study are evaluated, which exemplifies how vocational training can try to build capacities of self-training, criticism and transformation in a world with restrictions and strong professional demands.

LABOR CRISIS AND RECONFIGURATION OF TRAINING ACTIVITIES
In the context of a deep and protracted labor crisis, individuals are urged to train themselves and become the entrepreneur of their own employability (Basque et al., 2014;Schwab, 2020;International Labor Organization [ILO], 2023).In this scenario, the training of actors in the professional world, and in particular those responsible for training and human resources management, is at the center of growing tensions.As in many countries in Latin America (Chacaltana et al., 2015), continuing vocational training in Peru is increasingly oriented towards sociotechnical objectives of adapting the subject to the evolution of work.
Since the early 2000s, this technical approach has intensified and training is more than ever considered essential to prevent and mitigate the effects of structural and short-term unemployment.
Contrary to the humanistic goals that guided its institutionalization in the 1970s, training and an introspective approach.

FORMING AND TRANSFORMING TO ACT IN UNCERTAINTY
In the current context of crisis and uncertainty, preparing students to act effectively both as professionals and as citizens presents a significant challenge for those responsible for training.This crisis of work not only implies challenges in the objectives and working conditions, but also the need to prepare professionals capable of defining their personal position, defending moral and deontological principles, and finding a global sense to their action, as reflected in the findings of the World Economic Forum (2023).
In such an unstable environment, it is especially complex in university formations that prepare students for professions related to education, health and management, helping them develop a stance that guides their future actions.These students, as actors or future actors in the professional world, face a paradox: they need to adapt and rationalize their practices, but this carries the risk of favoring a merely instrumental act, at the expense of a more reflective and This approach also involves using practical experiences to encourage reflection on one's professional identity and develop an ethic based on critical knowledge and reflective distance.
Formation must therefore lead to the emergence or co-construction of meanings from the tensions between the individual, others and the environment.In this process, work on individual and collective experience becomes a central component of pedagogical design, especially relevant when it comes to adults with vast pre-existing experiences and beliefs.Research highlights the importance of fostering reflective practices in professionals to improve their ability to face complex and changing challenges in their fields of work (Sandars, 2009;Zeichner & Liston, 2014;Fuentealba & Russell, 2023).
Finally, from an epistemic perspective, transformative learning relies on dialog and intersubjectivity to explore and deconstruct the normative contexts of action.This approach promotes an emancipation that allows learners to question and transform their own perspectives of meaning, fostering a continuous process of critical reflection.By distinguishing and articulating instrumental learning from communicational learning, the training not only seeks to develop the students' professional autonomy in instrumental and situational terms, but also to strengthen their epistemological autonomy.This empowers them to question and make informed judgments, allowing them to influence their professional and social contexts.Through this approach, students can challenge and redefine values, ethics, and possibly ideologies, contributing significantly to the transformation of their environments (Eneau, 2011).
In short, the task of training is not only to meet the demand of learners to improve their skills and acquire a set of tools, especially useful for creating or managing complex devices and meeting certain prescriptions.Beyond responding to these instrumental needs, it is crucial to guide learners towards a more thoughtful and critical approach.Therefore, it is essential to shift the focus from mere certification -to avoid students focusing exclusively on obtaining the diploma -towards the prioritization of the development of skills that allow maintaining a critical distance, rather than on the mastery of technical tools such as project management, the

METHODOLOGY
This was precisely the challenge of action research carried out with professionals or future training professionals, who were directly involved in these issues.This approach was chosen to be called "training-action-research", reflecting through the order of the selected terms the priorities that articulate these three interrelated components.
In the Master of Education, 25 students were welcomed annually, most of whom were professionals who resumed their studies to validate their experience and obtain an academic degree.The program pursued, on the one hand, instrumental objectives of access and preservation of employment through the acquisition of skills certified by a diploma and, on the other hand, supported individuals in their personal development and as social subjects.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Confidentiality of participants' information was ensured by anonymizing the collected data and using codes to identify participants in the analyzes.In addition, informed consent was obtained from all participants, who were fully informed about the study objectives, procedures, potential risks and benefits, and their right to withdraw at any time without repercussions.To mitigate potential negative impacts on participants, support resources were provided, such as advice and ongoing monitoring.In addition, it was ensured that training activities did not adversely interfere with their professional responsibilities.

SELECTION OF PARTICIPANTS
The selection process included specific inclusion and exclusion criteria.Inclusion criteria included professionals and future education professionals who were enrolled in the master's degree and who wished to improve their training skills.Exclusion criteria included those who could not commit to regular attendance at face-to-face and field sessions.Participant observation was adopted as a method of data collection, analyzing interactions and continuously evaluating the reflective abilities of students during training sessions and in the professional environment.
In addition, key words derived from the linguistic activity of the participants (for example, interpersonal tensions, evaluation of practices, teamwork) were identified to define experiences and develop hypotheses of action to be experimented.
Habermas' theory of communicative action was mobilized to analyze the confrontation of the different social worlds of the institution, helping to understand the absence of a communicative logic that would allow the realization of common actions and the articulation of training needs as a strategic action.
Analyzes were developed from a double process of self-formation and conformation, built together in a shared object, allowing both individual and collective critical reflection and facilitating the transformation of perspectives.

STRUCTURE OF THE ALTERNATION PROGRAM
The training was carried out in alternation mode: he attended university two weekends a month from April to December and spent the rest of the time in the labor field.During the sessions, they were dedicated to analyzing professional practices and building the professional project.
At the beginning of the academic year, a collective meeting was organized with all teachers, and then meetings were held between the academic director, the teacher and the student.Teachers also collaborated in the first two months to define the project that the student would carry out, using a contractual pedagogy model that allowed negotiating the objectives and expected results.
This dialog approach confronted problems of different experiential spheres, with sometimes strategic, communicational and emancipatory interests.The training units, and especially the analysis of practices, became spaces to explore and clarify experiences, using discussion as a space for dialogic formation.These time-spaces allowed us to approach in a reflective way not only the experience lived in the professional places, but also the previous experience and the "frames of reference" of the students.Recent studies emphasize the effectiveness of these reflective and dialogical practices in higher education, underscoring their ability to foster critical thinking and a more personalized approach to learning (Gravett & Petersen, 2023).

STUDY LIMITATIONS
The limitations of the implemented model included the time, abilities and the margin of maneuver of the students to question and evolve the practices of the professional world during their training.In addition, the difficulty of managing the diversity of student experiences and needs in a heterogeneous learning environment was recognized.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The first observations of this experimentation illustrate how the transformative perspective can be mobilized in a vocational training device.Two sets of results are presented: on the one hand, the organization of training units as spaces for individual critical reflection and, on the other hand, the collective uses that students can make of this reflection in their transformative perspectives.Two specific examples illustrate these results in concrete ways.

INDIVIDUAL IMPLICATIONS DURING TRAINING
The training unit "Practice Analysis" focuses on learning a self-and co-reflective approach to work activity, focusing on issues of ethics and professional positioning of apprentices.Internship analysis sessions were organized half-day a month for five months, creating conditions for rational and thoughtful dialog.These periods allowed participants to exercise intercomprehension, the result of a double movement of decentralization and reflexivity.This transformative process can be modeled on the example of A., a student in the This process is illustrated in Figure 1.From the identification of keywords derived from linguistic activity, A.'s experience was defined as the construction of a professional position in an evaluative activity.The theoretical models used and the proposed action hypotheses turned out to be generalizable, addressing the construction of professional identity and theories of joint regulation.The hypotheses of action to be experimented, proposed by the group after the collective analysis, included: • Consider the evaluation and improvement of practices of responses to calls in your body according to the theory of joint regulation (between control regulation, based on the official referential of activities to respond to a call, and autonomous regulation, as informal practices of actors in action).
• Create the conditions for this joint regulation (in terms of instances and working arrangements), in the groups to be coordinated.
• Revise the specifications of the mission of A. to dialog with the tutor and the teacher reference of the master on the coherence of the project of the structure and personal expectations in terms of professionalization and professional project.
Starting from an individual and specific problem for a singular context, the reflective analysis work carried out by A., with the support of his group of peers, emerged from a selfformative as well as a conformative approach.The practice analysis module allowed each participant to enrich themselves with the contributions of others and train themselves by transforming their perspectives of meaning.

COLLECTIVE IMPLICATIONS AT THE END OF THE TRAINING
The training unit called "Device Engineering for Career Path Management" provides another example of thoughtful dialog within a deliberative framework.This device explores transformative learning to negotiate and build an object of study, with the aim of offering both schemes for the interpretation of professional situations and action strategies.The learning objectives are both emancipatory (learning to know each other, learning to for professionals (or future professionals) and the groups involved.Learning objectives are both emancipatory (learning to know each other, learning to learn) and instrumental, regulated by the forms of a communicative action in individual and collective dimensions.This device is schematized in Figure 2.

Figure 2
Modeling of the transformative learning process built from the action-research model (Barbier, 1996).
The transformative process, in relation to the professional context of the students, both from the perspective of the company and the professional action, is illustrated with the research carried out by S.During his formative year, S. progressively developed his personal research object, negotiating it with the pedagogical team, his thesis director, the group of students and his colleagues in his professional environment.S. carried out, carried out and tested his research   The individual transformation during the training sessions in the university is conceived as a necessarily long process, which develops in stages throughout the year, starting from a dialogic perspective that seeks to question how the singular experience can be distanced by testing different sense schemes than those of the individual representations of the learner.The enunciation of the situation allows, in the framework of a rational dialog, the social worlds of work and the experiences lived by the participants to be expressed.Objective knowledge (general theories), social knowledge (norms, values, representations, beliefs) and subjective knowledge (derived from situations lived by the subjects) are mobilized.Participants' sense distortions are questioned, which can be epistemological (non-integrated or misused knowledge), sociolinguistic (more or less correct use of a professional language, sometimes very technical) and psychological (emotions and sometimes misleading thoughts).The analysis is elaborated from a double process of self-formation and conformation, built together in a shared object, preserving the uniqueness of the action and its experience.

14
The collective transformation is contemplated at two levels: in the group of apprentices throughout the different meetings that mark the university year, through the training processes implemented, and in the work groups in which the apprentices are integrated during their period of professionalization.According to our observations, the latter case is rarer and seems to occur more frequently in professional apprentices returning to school than in younger or newer ones.
Professionals, thanks to their previous experience, can have a more global and complex vision of the social world in which they are immersed and come to university with both practical and ethical questions.Although little time is available to evaluate this, it seems more frequent to find the position of S. in apprentices who consider his return to university studies as a time of deep re-evaluation of his professional identity and even of confrontation of his values with those of his professional environment of origin.Not all apprentices have the time, skills or room for maneuver to question and evolve the practices of the professional world in which they participate during the year or two years of their training.Here is one of the main limitations of the implemented model.However, both for apprentices in the process of professionalization and for professionals who resume studies, the transformative perspective shows, at different levels, how it can contribute to articulate in a device based on alternation the singular and collective learning experience, self-training and training, individual and collective transformation, and existential and identity recompositions.
For younger learners, who have not yet fully exited the university environment and the world of initial training, critical distancing from environmental practices sometimes fails to overcome the instrumental logics required by managerial discourse or the constraints imposed by hierarchy.In contrast, reflective awareness is most often identified in more experienced students (professionals returning to school), with a marked penchant for a transformative process.It would not be appropriate to distinguish between these two groups those who between the younger or more experienced embark on a transformative process more individual or collective, more focused on themselves or more focused on the work environment as a place of transformative investment.On the contrary, there is a consensus among apprentices about wealth emanating from a heterogeneous group, with diversified personal and professional backgrounds and experiences.
Managing this diversity presents a great difficulty for the pedagogical team, since it requires a personalized and demanding accompaniment for each apprentice, which at the same time takes into account the previous experience, the experience lived during the year of formation and the reinvested in the collective work, and even in the social world of each one.

CONCLUSION
This research has explored the application of transformative perspective in university education, demonstrating how it can facilitate a significant critical distancing from the personal and professional experiences of apprentices.It has been found that, both in individual and collective contexts, the processes of self-formation and shaping are fundamental to foster deep and sustained transformation.These processes not only allow learners to question and reconstruct their perceptions and practices, they also promote a reassessment of their professional and personal roles within their work and educational environments.
In addition, key challenges associated with the limitations of the current education model have been identified, particularly in terms of diversity management and personalized accompaniment in heterogeneous learning environments.These findings underline the urgent need for pedagogical approaches that are flexible and adaptable to the individual needs of learners, which can significantly contribute to the improvement of university education.
For future research, it would be helpful to follow the development of learners beyond their training period to assess how the transformative perspective influences their long-term professional and personal trajectories.It should investigate how these individual and collective transformations can impact organizational and cultural practices, which could provide valuable insights into the evolution of education and labor policies.
This study affirms the relevance of transformative learning in higher education and highlights the importance of continuing to explore and refine this approach to maximize its effectiveness and applicability in various educational and professional contexts.In doing so, it could contribute to an educational reform that prioritizes not only the acquisition of knowledge, but also the integral development of the individual.
the training engineering proposed byPineau (2010), the creativity required in terms of devices poses significant challenges to those responsible for training, who must face a highly restricted context and increasingly standardized institutional expectations.One of the main challenges for the university is to design connections between practical knowledge of the world of work and theorists in the field of research.These devices seek to reconcile numerous paradoxical tensions, such as providing professionals who resume their studies with tools to analyze their own position between prescription and emancipation, offering adults key learners for their personal and professional development, and finally, equipping students who are professionalizing with conceptual structures to understand and transform the world.This contribution to the production of knowledge about this constellation of training engineering, which is in the process of being recomposed according toQuenson (2023), is materialized in a case study that describes a device implemented in a master's degree oriented to the training professions.This device promotes alternation, training and accompaniment towards self-training, with the aim of training professionals to act with critical reflection and autonomous judgment on the training situations they must design, as well as to proactively influence the world.The research question that guided this study was how teacher training programs could effectively integrate theory and practice to facilitate transformative learning that would enable students to develop critical and reflective competencies applicable in both professional and personal contexts.In response to this question, the study focused on analyzing how the alternation between theory and practice influenced the development of reflective and critical competencies in teacher training students, examining the effectiveness of pedagogical devices in promoting self-training and autonomous judgment, and evaluating the impact of reflectiveForming and Transforming: Critical Reflection in The University Education of Professionals ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.4 and critical training on students' ability to influence their professional and personal environments.
currently emphasizes efficiency, often to the detriment of personal development and critical reflection on the role of human resources, a phenomenon thatHead (2014) criticizes for how it dehumanizes workers by reducing them to mere components of technologically directed processes.HR professionals now almost exclusively emphasize goals such as return on investment, flexibility, adaptability, or employability of employees.This trend contrasts with more humanistic views of work, which value personal development and the significant contribution of employees beyond economic indicators.A view that Graeber (2018) sharply criticizes in his analysis on the proliferation of unnecessary jobs in modern economies, arguing that many of these roles do not contribute significantly to society or the personal well-being of the worker.In this context, the actors of the training are trapped in paradoxical logics, running the risk of developing and instituting instrumental practices to the detriment of a communicative action based on reflexivity and critical distance.Habermas (2003) addressed this problem by proposing a theory of communicative action that highlights the need for interactions based on mutual understanding rather than utilitarian goals.University teaching practices do not escape these complementary, but competitive, logics.Maintaining this articulation has become a key pedagogical challenge of university formations, where traditionally the acquisition of critical and argumentative skills was valued, to which now must be added a strong and omnipresent demand for professionalization.The role of universities in preparing for the training professions in Peru is increasingly being questioned, and numerous studies, such as those of the World Bank (2023), are being carried out to rethink the role and specific contributions of universities in the training of training professionals.In the master's degree in which pedagogical responsibilities were fulfilled, the challenge of developing a pedagogical model capable of integrating these educational paradigms was presented.This model, implemented in 2019 as part of a training-action-research initiative, focused on critical reflexivity.It combined principles of transformative learning with methods of alternation and self-training, seeking to enrich educational practice through both a practical

Forming
and Transforming: Critical Reflection in The University Education of Professionals ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.6 critical approach, a situation highlighted in the NCSBN study on stress and exhaustion among nurses during the pandemic (National Council of State Boards of Nursing [NCSBN], 2023).Despite these difficulties, the transformative learning based on the theories of the Frankfurt School, stresses that prioritizing instrumental logics can result in training that reproduces manipulative provisions(Freire, 2004), blocking the development of critical and conscious learning.According toMezirow & Taylor (2009), the transformative perspective of learning offers a path to integrate and confront the experiences of learners in a process of change both individually and collectively, focusing training towards personal and social change goals.
Forming and Transforming: Critical Reflection in The University Education of Professionals ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.7 construction of reference frameworks or financial competence.Within a framework of transformative self-training, our goal is to encourage the autonomous development of individuals, supporting their ability to act and think independently.

Forming
and Transforming: Critical Reflection in The University Education of Professionals ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.8 3.3 METHODS OF ANALYSIS The analysis of practices was carried out half a day a month for five months, focused on critical reflection and rational dialog about the work and training experiences of students.
s mission was to investigate how to improve the practices of response to calls for proposals in the training body where she carried out her practice.Through the thoughtful dialog during the training module, A. understood aspects that he had not clearly formalized.Its mission, of an evaluative nature, involved describing and critically analyzing the actions of those responsible for training.Difficulties in organizing and leading working groups, tensionsForming and Transforming: Critical Reflection in The University Education of Professionals ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.10 within teams, and the difficulty of maintaining objectivity in practical situations were discussed.

Figure 1
Figure 1Modeling the transformative learning process in practice analysis in his work context.S., a former educator at the Ministry of Education, took on the role of head of training when she resumed her studies in 2019-2020.His task included the elaboration and implementation of the training plan for secondary school educators.S.'s research focused on the evolution of the professional training system of this administration and the analysis of the training needs of the actors to develop effective, fair and useful responses.By identifying the ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.13 communication and decision flows, S. showed how practices are stressed due to the confrontation between a descending institutional logic, which seeks the rationalization of work and its means (Taylor model and production of adaptive formations), and the logics of the actors derived from the culture of the trade (more ascending and deliberative).Through Habermas' theory of communicative action, S. revealed the problematic confrontation of the different social worlds of the institution and the absence of a communicative logic that would allow an agreement to be reached on the realization of a common action (the training plan).He defined the analysis of training needs as a strategic action that facilitates the convergence of the institutional project with that of the actors, and the necessary work of elucidation and negotiation in this analysis.By highlighting the growing gap between prescribed work and the actual work of educators, S.'s research exposed another tension experienced by actors: an increasing labor suffering that, according to S., training should consider in its political, functional, and operational dimensions.In this context, research becomes a potentially transformative object of knowledge, practices and representations for both the student and the groups involved.It accompanies not only the development of a subject, but also the transformation of the actors and organizations where the research is carried out.The transformative perspective based on Mezirow's work shows in its forms of application two examples of critical distancing by apprentices with respect to their personal and professional experience, both individually and collectively, in the training group (during sessions at the university) and also in the professional environment (during and after training).

Following
the development of the apprentices at the end of their training, future research could ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.7 | p.1-17 | e08381 | 2024.15 allow us to observe how the transformative perspective could influence the future of these actors.If this perspective really has existential, social, professional and cultural implications, as Mezirow states, then it remains to analyze the possible organizational transformations that these apprentices could reinvest in the processes and ends of the working world in which they will subsequently have to act.