The vibrant beauty of matter. The pandemic as an opportunity to reveal educational materiality

Abstract

The pandemic has triggered changes that from a pedagogical point of view can be interpreted as accelerators of the digitalization processes of education and intensifiers of educational problems that have existed for some time. The pandemic scenario, despite its criticality, also represents a precious opportunity to unveil social and material assemblage that characterizes educational practices in their daily occurrence. In fact, in the current emergency, it is precisely that materiality made up of bodies, spaces, objects, rituals, affects, physical proximity that returns to prominence and to which we were not used to paying attention and that remained invisible, as it was taken for granted. The paper therefore intends to question the pedagogical and epistemological implications connected to the recovery of a gaze capable of reading educational materiality, in order to understand the transformations underway and to orient them towards sustainable educational futures.