Recent innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence raise epistemological issues regarding the nature of knowledge and the reproducibility of human intelligence, with some uncertain implications about the ambiguity of their application and their future developments. This reflection aims at bringing to light some problems related with the incipient use of these tools in the area of scientific knowledge and thinking.

Elective home education has become an international trend characterized by considerable public controversy and much legal fragmentation. Issues related to whether it should be permitted and how it should be monitored are currently being debated in many countries. Homeschooling regulation seems to have become a “wicked problem” with no definitive solution. A case has been made for moving beyond the polarization that tends to label it as either intrinsically good or inherently bad. By drawing its foundations from a UNESCO report (...) published in 2021, this conceptual study is meant to be a contribution to the discussion about the social and legal legitimacy of homeschooling through the delineation of a tenable “social contract for home education”. It has been argued that in light of this social contract, homeschooling should neither be banned nor unregulated. Hence, a shift of perspective is being encouraged to include home educators in a pluralistic dialogue on the future of education towards policy decisions that are sensitive to this complexity. (shrink)

The subject of bullying has received widespread academic attention, going back to pioneering studies in the 1970s. However, work in this area has tended to take a gender-neutral/male perspective that does not distinguish between male and female bullying. While retaining a dialogue with generalist literature on the subject, this article seeks to highlight the theoretical and political-social relevance of gender-specific and intersectional approaches when exploring the question of bullying between adolescent girls. Based on the study _Il bullismo femminile a scuola. (...) Un’indagine intersezionale mixed-method_ (Female bullying at school, an intersectional, mixed-method study) – conducted in medium-sized and large cities in northern, central and southern Italy – it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework in which to consider the phenomenon of female bullying in Italian schools. (shrink)

The presence of dual and ambivalent characters (good/ bad) has always constituted the aesthetic and educational content in children’s fairy tales. Since the Nineteenth century, fairy tales and children’s books have had as an essential reference increasingly complex images and illustrations with vivid colors. This, together with the narration, has allowed the flourishing of a genre of fairy tale noir, whose explicitly pedagogical content is grafted into the plots not always “to happy ending” of fairy tales. The book by Heinrich (...) Hoffmann, _Struwwelpeter_, and that by Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, _Der Sandmann_, which are at the heart of this essay, constituted a first, important example of this new kind of narrative. They have revealed, from a pedagogical-psychoanalytic perspective, the value of what Freud in a 1919 paper, _Das Unheimliche_, analyzed as a necessary manifestation of presence/absence (conscious and unconscious) in the phases of human growth. (shrink)

The present paper argues that as basic schools become more pluralistic, it is important to (re)discuss the value base on which education should be built. Many see human rights as a universal principle of Western democratic societies and thus a universal value base of education. However, human rights seem to be insufficient – first, because many question their universality, and second, because they are understood mainly as legal rather than ethical principles. The concept that is known to ethically support human (...) rights is the global ethic. And from one of the main pillars of the global ethic we derive the universal value base of education – the responsibility for the other, understood as care for the other, being for the other, treating and approaching the other with respect. To this end, teachers should encourage social interactions, based on active listening and exotopy. (shrink)

Today, the persistence of infantile attitudes into adulthood seems to have become a way of life associated with enjoyment and the renunciation of social obligations. Contemporary society, crossed by the emotional culture of Social Media, favors the example of parents who are friends with their children, of teachers who are enemies of their parents and of young people who are far from authority and traditional morality. Distances between parents and children and between teachers and pupils are eliminated. Today's adolescent is (...) represented with the image of Narcissus because within the affective family he grows up with the idea that success is the goal for achieving happiness and personal satisfaction. What future prospects can you imagine for young people? How to tackle adult frailty? The pedagogical debate could reflect on new educational systems that concern the affective and relational dimension of young people and the orientation skills of adults. By accepting the new needs of young people, adults could carry out that progressive process of affectivity, the acceptance of new educational, affective and relational functions. (shrink)

The article proposes looking at children's literature, particularly the form of the picture book, as an educational resource for producing body awareness in school. Eight reading steps for as many bodily actions aimed at naming the body, activating it, getting to know it and moving it in space, on and off the pages; between grounding, listening, breathing, playing and moving, the rediscovery of gestures and anatomical truths invites to deepen self-knowledge as a preliminary act to the encounter and relationship with (...) the other and with the environment. The picture books by their specificities of short form and cross-over, offer, even in non-fiction production, the possibility of bringing attention back to the body dimension within the school and educational debate, where it lives today in a state of malaise and oblivion. Meaningful conversations, explorations and relationships flow from the pages of the albums: research on language as a tool that gives dignity and value to each person, and encounters with the artistic representation of the world as an infinite mirror of its multiplicity and variety, constitute valuable opportunities for an education that is aware of the wholeness of learners and teachers and the integrated, erotic and embodied dimension of their relationship. (shrink)

Parent-teacher conferences (PTCs) are important institutional encounters to promote a constructive dialogue and alliance between the school and the family system. However, cooperation between parents and institutional actors is not always straightforward, especially in the case of foreign parents. Because of the unequal familiarity of the latter with the institutional frameworks and language resources needed to participate effectively in PTCs, foreign parents risk having less communicative resources to rely on in the joint construction of the interaction. In this paper we (...) focus on eight PTCs with foreign parents, paying attention to occurrences where children's learning difficulties are linked by teachers to their language skills. Using a conversation analysis framework, we will observe how language issues are intertwined with cultural, identity, and moral aspects that need special attention in order to enhance and support the effective construction of educational alliances between schools and families. (shrink)