Socio-anthropological approaches to educational issues: grounds, methods and epistemological reflections [Editorial]
Approcci socio-antropologici alle questioni educative: terreni, metodi e riflessioni epistemologiche [Editoriale]
Résumé
Today, the socio-anthropology of education and comparative education constitute an emerging disciplinary field that allows us to understand and interpret more objectively not only local forms of kinship, caring and socialisation but also, and above all, the relationship that certain human groups have with knowledge and the different possible conceptions associated with the notion of education. The research carried out in recent years has enabled us to learn about the organisational models that govern local family and community structures, to understand the mechanisms that give them a certain pedagogical validity and, finally, to understand that each human group uses cultural transmission strategies shaped by the (natural and socio-cultural) context.
This scientific production has highlighted the different roles played by parents, families, teachers and communities, contributing to the understanding of this typically human experience that is education.
The socio-anthropological approach to educational issues, unlike the cognitive one, has been primarily concerned with comparisons and comparisons, in order to systematically describe and analyse the strategies through which, in the different cultures and subcultures that make up our global village, networks, groups and social institutions pursue the universal goal of educating the members of their communities. The methods at our disposal - ethnography, systematic observation or enquiry, for example - facilitate 'contamination' between disciplines, allow us to access both formal educational contexts (teaching and the everyday life of the school community) and informal ones (the transmission of ethical norms, socialisation, language learning, games, intergenerational relations and even household chores) and, above all, allow us to overcome the sterile opposition between qualitative and quantitative methods.
In a world that has become multidimensional, in which institutional systems and forms of social organisation at local, national, and supranational levels are juxtaposed, it has become difficult to find common criteria. The coexistence of people with specific needs and from different cultural backgrounds in the same educational environments represents another challenge to the dogmatisms -often implicit- that guide educational action (in the family, at school, or in other spheres) and that every culture tends to assume as absolute and universal. In a planetary context in which walls and barriers seem to rise as normality, the point of view proposed by the socio-anthropology of education therefore has the considerable advantage (but also the responsibility) of confronting us with diversity, with the ethnographic elsewhere, with the margins of our humanity.
This special issue of the Italian Journal of Health Education, Sport and Inclusive Didactics brings together thirteen contributions based on this perspective, following disciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches, and offering to our readers the widest and most up-to-date panorama of research. The articles we selected critically discuss a series of fundamental issues:
1.The role of the research terrain (understood as a geographical context, as a human and natural ecosystem or as interactive dynamics);
2.The validity of socio-anthropological research methods for studying educational dynamics;
3.The epistemological reflections inherent to the possibility of proposing didactic solutions that are contextualised, inclusive and capable of considering our humanity in all its diversity.
We are confident that, in this post-pandemic era (so charged with tensions and critical conditions) a more human-centred approach to educational issues would offer food for thoughts (and for action) and that our readers will appreciate our willingness to show, with some optimism, that another world is possible.
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