Topic. If the commitment of the school to respond to the community's tensions and challenges is not a new idea (Dewey, 1899, 1929), at least three tensions are, however, new within our global reality: the irreducible tension between innovation&sustainability (e.g. with regard to the climate crisis), between equality&difference (e.g. with regard to inequality and racism) and between individual well-being&common good (e.g. with regard to the current pandemic, social and economic crisis) (Fucecchi&Nanni, 2019).

Despite the functionalistic perspective on the basis of which the school is managed nowadays, it can no longer delay its commitment to contribute to the community transformation in an ethical direction with regard to each of the previous tensions and problems (Unesco, 2021). To be effective, this commitment has to start educating the future global citizens early, on a large scale and in a logic of partnership between school and families. For this reason, it is necessary to work starting from the Primary School, educating children in order to promote their capacity to reimagine social systems – from the local to the global level – and to act for their innovation (Unesco, 2015, 2017).

Research Question. How can families and schools work together in educating future global citizens able to promote changes to improve their communities? In particular, which are the competences that the Primary Schools can promote in partnership with families in order to render the children able to be changemakers (Welldon, 2018) within their actual and future communities?

Objective. Among the possible competences that schools and families can and must promote, the paper aims at clarifying the priority and meaning of the competence of critical, ethical and intersubjective judgment and the ways to promote it in Primary School.

Theoretical Framework. The promotion of judgment competence is essential to be able to judge in relation to the context, the criteria and the process that are necessary for the management of all the current community's tensions. In relation to the context, competence of judgment is essential in order to maintain a constructive dialogue between local and global, in which the future citizens are able to deeply examine the reality, to discern the differences, the resources and risks without applying prejudices and stereotypes, to decide and act starting from the particular (local) situation and at the same time aiming at a global good (Mortari, 2020). In relation to the criteria, it is essential to be able to judgeon the basis of more just and sustainablecriteria. It is a problem of questioning and overcoming the mindsets that maintain bias not only in classrooms but above all in society, recognizing new criteria of judgment and deciding in a critical way (Longo, 2021). In relation to theprocess, the tensions that the global society present cannot be managed through an individual logical-rational deliberation process. They must be managed through a deliberation process of inter-subjective discrimination and decision, the only process capable today of effectively managing the social tensions and challenges (Meirieu, 2018).

Despite the Primary School's long European tradition in promoting judgment capacity during the previous century (Bruner, 1966; Dewey, 1929; Maritain, 1966; Hessen, 1958; Spranger, 1960), the novelty brought by the current tensions recalls a new theoretical perspective on judgment: the critical-phenomenological perspective (Chiurazzi, 2005). Within this frame, a particular contribution can be offered by Hannah Arendt (1965, 1978, 1989), who ethically questioned the great “world tensions” of human existence (Benhabib, 2003) – war, totalitarianism, persecution of Jews, violence, justice, freedom, … – recognizing their turning point in the Faculty of Judging and in its specific capacities of tasting, thinking, imagining and deciding thanks to the sensus communis.

Starting from this theoretical frame and on the basis of the arendtian perspective, the paper aims at clarifying the meaning and the ways to promote the critical and intersubjective judgment in the Primary School through the analysis of a research project led by the University of Turin during the s.y. 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 in a Primary School, involving ten teachers, two classrooms and the children's families. The research methodology refers to the participatory action-research (Cadei, Deluigi&Pourtois, 2016; Orefice, 2006; Sorzio, 2019; Freire, 1968; Michelini, 2013; Schön 1983, 1987; Grange, 2014). It is a research methodology particularly fertile not only in the social field but also in the field of the Primary School (Pourtois, 1993, 1988, 1990; Barbier, 2007, 2003; Losito&Pozzo, 2005) and in particular because of its commitment to transforming society. Action-research in fact is intended to propose itself as an experience of empirical and qualitative research aimed not only at the study of phenomena but especially to their transformation with particular regard, following Lawrence Stenhouse (1975), to the needs genuinely perceived and identified by the teachers, the families, the children and the actors involved, which have the role of co-reseachers. Within this methodological perspective, the research planning is articulated in two different phases for each s.y: Firstly (February-April 2022), a path of teachers training and dialogic design of an educational activity on the promotion of the judgment capacity (five meetings). This phase is facilitated by the researcher and observed by two “critical friends”. Secondly (May-June 2022), an educational activity with children (nine years old) within the maths and language disciplines and involving the families and the communities, reflecting, discussing, deciding in partnership about a central topic for the community life. The meeting numbers and the specific modalities of family involvement will be decided within the action-research process by the teachers. The educational activity will be projected by the teachers referring to the five steps identified by Hannah Arendt for the promotion of judgment capacity: the taste, the "thinking for oneself", the dialogical confrontation, the imagining, the inter-subjective deliberation, the definition of a common action. These five steps will be followed starting from an experience/fact/social problem on which to exercise the judgment capacity with regard to the tensions between local and global dialogue. Within the next s.y. 2022-2023 these two phases will be repeated in order to improve the teacher training and the educational practice experimentation.

The realization of the action-research led in s.y. 2021-2022 will allow us: to identify the main aspects, potentialities and criticalities of an effective teacher training to be able to promote the judgment capacity; to analyse and improve the five principal formative steps to exercise the children's judgment capacity; to identify the central topics (experiences, facts, problems) on which to exercise the judgment capacity with regard to the tensions between local and global dialogue; to identify the criteria to evaluate the transformation of the judgment capacity in children; to define the transformations of the judgment capacity in children; to understand the ways in which the judgment capacity can effect the community's transformation; to understand the role of the families in this formative path. In order to evaluate, analyse and interpret these expected outcomes, an evaluation will be conducted both in the first and in the second phase. In the first formative phase, a pre and post evaluation will be realized through qualitative questionnaires (Beed, Stimson, 1985; Ammuner, 1998) addressed to the participant teachers and analysed with the teachers themselves. In the second formative phase, an hermeneutic analysis (Kvale, 1996; Betti, 1987) will be led on the recorded dialogues realized during the activities in classroom, on the materials created by the children and the families (written materials, drawings) and on the professional diaries written by the teachers after each activity. The analysis will be discussed and perfected with the teachers, and finally with the families. The evaluation, analysis and interpretation of these expected outcomes will represent the basis for the realisation of an open discussion with the local community on the personal and social transformations obtained thanks to the research project.

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