This article results from an ethnographic investigation carried out in a technical team of adult education in an educational and development centre in the north of Portugal. One of the aims of this research, reported in this article, was the attempt to understand if and how a team of adult education can itself learn in their working place and in this way, try to verify if the institution, which frames its activity, may turn into an organization that learns. The results show that this team can learn in many different ways during the development of its action and that, in such a context, a strong collective dimension of learning is present. In the base of that process are the action rules, that is, the characteristic forms of doing in that particular place: mutual help, reformulation and generalization of doing, and the processes of reflection in and on the action. Before such results we may come to the conclusion that we are in presence of a learning community and an organization that learns.
Organizational Learning; Technicians; Adult Education