Una Scuola (A school)

Our educational and teaching experience in direct contact with schools and teachers strongly suggests that we can no longer ignore the need to rethink the current system. In the paper, we’ll outline what we believe to be the key characteristics of a school that aims to maintain and further develop its functions. The school that we have in mind is open to the world, and therefore in dialogue with both the environment and the society beyond its own confines. This contact with the outside context spontaneously raises questions, facilitating the use of an educational method that investigates the world, with its intrinsically interdisciplinary character. Nature is the guide par excellence. Learning must be underpinned by a search for meaning, on the part of each individual subject, teacher and student. Teaching is oriented towards developing students’ desire to explore (Guerra, 2013), research and transform, with a view to building a habit of enquiry that will prompt the learners to conduct their own in-depth investigations of the world and of knowledge. This kind of school prompts a complete revisiting of existing educational programmes, because subject areas therefore become contexts in which to have experiences and to interpret what one has experienced. Teachers too should embrace the practice of evaluating and self-evaluating their work and their pupils work documentating projects and processes. All of children’s experiences at school should be informed by the dimension of play, because play is intrinsically an experience of growth, understanding, and amplification, which takes place under the aegis of freedom (Antonacci, 2012). Therefore, school, as we envisage it, sets out to be radical, poetic and utopian: it is a school in which nobody is afraid to try out something completely new, or to say or do something that might appear to be meaningless, useless or unproductive. The paper concludes with examples of educational projects implemented by the authors.