With “Educational Alliances” I propose activities and services with a view to an educational alliance, favouring the inclusion of the activities I conduct within a wider educational network and favouring the main educational alliance, that with the person himself, preparing the conditions for his conscious and collaborative participation.
Networking, coordinating, cooperating in a multidisciplinary and transversal way… In the educational relationship, it is important to consider that we are part of a wider network. Once this point is clear in the educator’s mind, his educational action can be oriented and prepared to interface in a positive way with other existing realities; people, professions, social groups and institutions, for example. Always putting the person at the centre.
We know that places of education are going through a period of crisis and can sometimes reveal an inadequacy of their action because they find it difficult to read contemporary socio-cultural changes and to change their action accordingly. These changes have the characteristics – to quote Zygmunt Bauman – of “liquid modernity” in which the distinctive features of the past are blurred, and it is more difficult to find one’s direction and common points of reference.
If we are talking about schools, families, youth groups, but also about teams and work teams, the current situation depicts a phase of stalemate in which people are trying to recalibrate, to find new balances and new or different filters with which to read and better understand all these changes.
This need to find points of reference poses the risk of a retreat into one’s own characteristic traits, at times even a little narcissistic, in search of a reassuring niche that could however isolate one from an educational community dimension, while instead it could be an opportunity to create new communities, and new networks, to succeed in rethinking oneself, to grasp and release the wealth of potential linked to the different specificities of action by networking and harmonising knowledge, methods and actions to achieve educational objectives.
Hence the need for a broader overview. It is important to rethink relations between educational institutions and between professional figures, not based on simple forms of mutual tolerance, but as an ordinary way of an integrated educational relationship.
Educational networks and ‘alliances’ must therefore be created in which the functions and contributions that each person can make are valued, so as to link formal, informal and non-formal education together. The coherent integration of the experiences that each individual can carry out in different environments and contexts can help to promote the formation of free, autonomous and responsible personalities.
Marco Fiamin