The Recognition, Validation and Certification (RVC) of informal and non-formal learning embodies a process that impacts the societal, organizational and individual levels of the educational domain, particularly Adult Education. Within the European Union’s Lifelong Learning education policies, Member States have been invited to place RVC as one of the central strategies in the promotion of adult learning, assuming that it helps to motivate “resistant” individuals to participate in adult education, values prior learning, saves time and money (as people don’t have to relearn what they already know), and finally grants societies the benefits of no-cost learning (Commission of the European Communities, 2006). In Portugal, where 3.5 million of the active (i.e. fit to work) population hasn’t finished the 12th grade, RVC has come to be, since the year 2000, the fundamental “main entrance” into adult education and training, and nowadays represents the core strategy of the “New Opportunities Program” (MTSS / ME, 2006), allowing the attainment of academic certification through the validation of non-formal and informal learning. While adult education in general is considered to be a route to empowerment for disenfranchised groups (CONFINTEA, 1997), RVC in particular is acknowledged as a “pre-condition” (Melo, Lima & Almeida, 2002) for the engagement of specific groups in further and more structured education and training, also within an empowerment framework, where the process itself is regarded as a way to regain the self and social value of lifespan knowledge acquisitions (DGFV, 2004), in the end, as an opportunity for personal development. The particular nature of the process calls for specific skills from the pedagogical team, namely the use of learner-centred strategies, experiential learning approaches and a portfolio-based competence validation, within an overall implicit theoretical humanistic approach to learning (ibid.), in which the teacher becomes a tutor instead of a master, and the adult is guided through the re-discovery of his/her lifelong and lifewide learning. In this sense, RVC challenges the power relationships between learner and teacher, as well as the concepts and practices of teaching and learning, in a policy changing educational context.

Studies have shown that there are some attitudinal and behavioural change which could be related to the process itself (Canelas, 2004) and that it might be promoting civic and vocational development (Amorim, 2006), but there are still demands for more in-depth studies on the individual impacts of RVC (e.g. Singh, 2005). In order to fulfil this claim, this study will expand a recent research (Gomes, Coimbra & Menezes, 2007) exploring the relationships between training climate and psychological empowerment, which applied a mixed-method approach including a longitudinal data collection using adapted instruments for a low-qualified population, focus-groups and interviews with trainees and other actors from the pedagogical teams.

Preliminary results (ibid.) have shown that affiliation, critical voice and shared control are predictive characteristics of the training climate in the development of psychological empowerment, namely in the interactional and behavioural components (Zimmerman, 1995). In this study, we will try to draw some solutions to the following questions: how does a particular training climate (RVC) influence the development of psychological empowerment? What are the specific characteristics in the training climate which contribute the most to the development of psychological empowerment? Are there differences between the trainees’ and the trainers’ discourse on the perceptions of the training climate and psychological empowerment? What are the implications of the findings for teacher education in Europe?