From learning process to educational dynamic: when does an educational context generate well-being? Reasons and limits of a pedagogical-social reflection

Abstract

The intentionality of learning still represents the starting construct from which to move a pedagogical reflection capable of analyzing formal, nonformal and informal educational contexts. The university, understood as a training academy, is nourished by the characterizations proper to formal education, from the context in which learning takes place, the intentionality and the degree of planning and design of it, to the processes of certification of what is transmitted/acquired. The profound crisis of the educational-training sphere in today's time, however, calls for a broader pedagogical reflection to be able to give practical follow-up to the shift from a learning-only context to an educational context. And it is in this form that we can grasp all the valences of the formal university educational context from a pedagogical-social perspective. University, therefore, not only as a properly formal place but, based on the dictate of a more modern pedagogy of schooling, a space that becomes a promoter of well-being and care for the citizen of the future, safeguarding the dimension of the humanitas of people and the relationships that are generated and give substance to their identity construction.

This contribution, based on these brief premises, aims to investigate possible scenarios for rethinking the educational and organizational models of the university from the centrality of the person, his or her care and well-being in learning.