The common good as ‘teaching knowledge’. The training-research “Citizenship, identity building and culture of respect”

Abstract

The article presents the theoretical framework, the design research and the first outcomes of an exploratory investigation on the meanings of common good given by school teachers. It focuses on the negotiation process that brings teacher from a personal to a shared meaning of common good through the comparison with colleagues. The investigation was carried out by the DidaSco Research Group of the For.Psi.Com Department of the University of Bari Aldo Moro within the project Citizenship, identity building and culture of respect and involved a network of five schools. In the first part, the theoretical construct of common good is presented as an object of educational reflection and as a complex intervention goal, both socio-political and ethical. In the second part, focusing on the didactic model of “transposition”, the design of the training-research and the methodological devices, used in the training – mental maps and autobiographical writings – are described. As the first results confirm the polysemous concept but, at the same time, provide new synthetic meanings of common good, the contribution ends inviting researchers and teachers to operate a deconstruction of the concepts, a shearing of the “personal knowledge” and the co-construction of the core-content of the school curriculum.