A Pedagogy of Discontinuity and “Affective Thought”: Education amid Crisis, Reconstruction and New Beginning

Abstract

In order to think of a pedagogy of emergence and beyond emergency, this contribution will outline a theoretical device by dovetailing existentialism with pragmatism, thus taking up an intuition of Nicola Abbagnano and inflecting it in an educational direction. On the one hand, I will appeal to Otto Friedrich Bollnow: by innovatively interpreting certain notions of existentialism, he has conceived of “discontinuous forms of education”, linked to existential breakdowns, which may open onto “new beginnings”, forged in the crucible of the critique (structurally interlaced with the crisis). On the other, some Deweyan motifs will be introduced and, in particular, the idea of the emergence of the new, arising from the communal effort of those who, facing a situation of imbalance, are engaged in a process of intelligent reconstruction which as such is constitutively educational. While Dewey will allow us to attenuate the individualistic tenor of Bollnow’s perspective, the latter affords a better focalization on the urgency of any critical situation.