Building a reflexive and ethically grounded teachers’ professionalism From the teaching of emotions to the pedagogy of difference 209

Abstract

In the world of pedagogy emotional pedagogy has established itself. Biology and neuroscience confirm the key role of emotions in the cognitive dimension and for the quality of life. Becoming emotionally literate enables to improve relations with others, together with a more aware way of living our lives, more freely and less violently. Rationality has a value that none can deny but which is not the most important to be taken into consideration, not even at school. Cartesian thought must be overturned and we need to uphold that in order to be individuals with a solid identity, we need to feel what we think.
At school the teacher can choose to position herself in a new perspective, of constant openness and flexibility, of welcoming and comprehension, to respond to new situations with reflexive and critical competences and to interpret the reality of the school and its pupils, in a perspective of possibility, of pedagogical problematic and of existential planning.
Among the key questions there is the educational relationship and teacher professionalism: it is the teacher who delineates the theoretical-practical orientations that can promote in the school the ethic of responsibility and commitment, the pedagogy of difference and of respect, the teaching of reason and of the emotions with the pedagogical aim of integration, and of enhancing every pupil’s individuality, the particular diversity of the human being, and to co-construct, in an inclusive and including school, life projects
that are significant because they are meaningful.