The Future of Education

In contemporary higher education, soft skills are increasingly recognized as strategic competences in professional degree programs; however, their presence within curricula remains heterogeneous and often implicit. Grounded in the Dublin Descriptors and the construct of signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005), this study investigates how soft skills are declared, integrated, and assessed in the official syllabi of four professional undergraduate programs at the university of Trieste: Education Sciences (19 syllabi), Social Work (22 syllabi), Speech Therapy (73 syllabi), and Physiotherapy (42 syllabi).

How are soft skills formally represented across different disciplinary areas? A systematic documentary analysis was conducted through recursive readings of 156 syllabi, identifying soft skills embedded in learning objectives, theaching methodologies, and assessment pratices. Through an inductive analytical process, soft skills were categorized based on semantic affinities and recurrent pattern, then coded as present (1) or absent (0), distinguishing between formal explicitness and implicit presence.

Findings reveal a shared core of soft skills (communication, critical thinking, teamwork, and analytic skills), alongside significant disciplinary variations. Humanities programs emphasize empathic-reflective capacities and dialogic-partecipatory competences and situated, practice-based pedagogies. A structural-discrepancy emerges in the curricular recognition of internships: highly formalized as core component in healthcare programs, they remain less structured in humanities programs, revealing implicit epistemological hierarchies between technical-procedural knowledge. These results inform curricular design aimed at fostering transformative teaching and learning practices in Higher Education.