Panel E.07 — Practices and perspectives of self-reform in university teaching
Convenors Andrea Lombardinilo (Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy); Tiziana Tarsia (University of Messina); Francesco Cappa (Bicocca University, Milan)
Keywords University, education, teaching, reformism, innovation
What role do professors and researchers play in the construction of the academic environment? What effects have the techniques and methods of e-learning produced in the social and educational contexts? How is it possible to balance the recent normative hypertrophy with the evolution of languages and teaching practices?
A perspective of self-reform in university teaching should count on the widely-scattered myths of the origins but not on the collective epic inspiring the attributed to the process of school innovation. Self-reform in university teaching has neither manifestos nor repertories of well-planned practices. The didactic investment of single actors has not been supported by a choral tradition, for reasons that may appear obvious; which makes it all the more necessary to investigate such apparently obvious reasons.
Many experimentations have produced something new, but only here and there within classrooms; their mainly individual characteristic has exposed them to the risk of self-complacency and disillusion; the exception of the isolated, charismatic teacher confirms that in our didactic environment s human and professional qualities travel separately.
Between the hammer of technocracy and anvil of student satisfaction, and beyond the Newspeak of current didactic formulas, our universities have the opportunity to shape their own pedagogy in order to create and promote an environment of professional success.
Therefore, the proposed panel aims at:
– investigating which models of university social intelligence are inspired by teaching self-reform practices and understanding how to recognize them through specific sets of concrete actions;
– analyzing the relationship between normative regulation and participative democracy in line with the effort to transform the academic environment into a laboratory of shareable practices;
– describing and probing those professional experiences combining university teaching, public engagement and empiric research;
– reflecting on the positive conditions and drawbacks concerning the construction of a research community aimed at replacing the dead weight of the ongoing academic discourse;
– focusing on the discourse criticizing the university, in line with an interdisciplinary perspective that takes into account the work of sociologists, educators, philosophers, essayists.