Clinica della formazione as research in Adult education

Abstract

This article calls for an epistemology that is organised in such a way as to make crystal
clear those procedures and values that support educational training and care, with reference
to embodied experience and case studies, i.e. the clinical knowledge that enables the
establishment of workshops that generate reflection for professionals. In the Italian debate
on pedagogical epistemology, Riccardo Massa proposed “Clinica della formazione”
as a method of research in adult education: a proposal that studies the phenomenology
of educational experience and the consequences that historical materialism and psychoanalysis
produce in the pedagogical discourse, with regard to international topics and researchers.
It is an “empirical hermeneutics” that bears witness to the vocation for research
into every educational process: interpretation means depicting objectively, from an idiographic
and qualitative perspective, that which allows subjectivity to emerge from History
and stories, without the need for technical or moral prescription.