Session Information
ERG SES C 14, Context and Content in Education
Contribution
According to Karpov (2015), our time is characterized by metaphors of instability, ambiguity, globalization, fragmentation and transformation to which Europe responds in term of local and trasnational policies.
The international trend describes social, cultural and economic situations in terms of crisis and it needs to find a path between a complicated present and a vague future. We live in time of complexity where the stock market, the human body, ecosystems, the manufacturing trade, the immune system, the colonies of termites and organizations follow similar patterns (sustainability, viability, health, and innovation) and it is requesting a new way to question reality flirting with complexity (Kaufman e Stemberg, 2010) and moving towards age of wisdom (Drucker, 2000). The principal idea is to construct a new way of thinking within the humanities, in particular education: generativity. Certainly, the mission of educational systems is to develop a type of learning able to overcome the current concept of creativity for its own sake and to reconsider/integrate the concept of reflexivity, directionality and attention to value. In this way, the term generativity is applicable as confirmed by all international publications in different research areas (from generative welfare to generative learning, from generative music to generative economy). These associations are motivated by Erikson’s works on personality (1993, 2008) but we have investigated and questioned further meanings and if generativity could represent an useful concept for a new educational horizon. The transdisciplinary and epistemological view of this work tries to generate a new paradigm in which we connect trasfenomenity, transdisciplinarity and interdiscoursivity with theoretical and practical fields and we rediscover care, responsability and responsivity both in education and in research.
How can education evolve if we associate it with the term generative? Which principles should we start with? Will we be able to overcome the incapacity and the pathologies of our core disciplines? Is it generativity the new vocabulary of education? The new paradigm research asks us to reformulate a theory of complexity and develop theories of change?
Our interest is to understand how to deal with an age of wisdom and contemplate the complexity that requires cross-cutting approaches, renegotiations heterogeneous forms of knowledge. Giving epistemic value to generativity, we will overcome eclecticism and relativism. If there is no explanation of the complexity, there is no definition of generativity. We notice a lack of framework that allows for the understanding the learning and development of the processes of change. What is generativity? Why we prefer it to creativity and innovation? How is it possible to speak of generative production of knowledge and experience?
To treat generativity means to draw a new mutual reality where we face the actual ambiguity of age and create human action, learning and planning in order to develop adaptable and flexible subjects.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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