Dealing with conflicts in order to trigger transformative learning. A learning space inside the university

My contribution presents some conceptual reflections about thematic workshops addressed to university students. These workshops are part of the Master Degree in Educational Sciences curriculum and structured on the basic idea that a professional educator is often (always?) asked to deal with conflictual dimensions during his/her working activity . Sometimes this dimension lies in the background , other times is part of an explicit request of managing and solving conflicts. I organize the workshop every year since 2012, engaging student as co-researchers following the lines traced by the co-operative inquiry paradigm. The common exploration aim is to interrogate a plurality of issues related to the concept of conflict, and, in particular, the relationship between conflict and learning. Following Formenti's spyral of knowledge the exploration encourage to contact experiences, transform them into aestethical representations , reflect and consider new kind of potential actions. Metaphors, disorienting dilemmas and personal theories represent the materials at the centre of the collective dialogue, a participatory hermeneutic circle. These elements allow the possibility to “open” the concept of conflict , tracing the meanings, effects and different contexts that structure it along the variety of the different participants' experiences. The main purpose is to gain reflection about the frames of references that structure participants' point of view about conflicts and about the idea of “managing conflicts”. Besides, in my intention, there is the idea of structuring a context in which “deuterolearning” will enhance the learning potential involved in conflicts. According with the anthropologist Marianella Sclavi, the “crash” related to the etymology of the word (conflictùs) could be considered as a crash of different frames of referenc. So the conflict valuable heuristic potential consists in the possibility to gain insights about those elusive frames of reference that structure our point of view and that become “visible” in the very conflictual moment. According to Mezirow, this is a fundamental and necessary step toward Transformative Learning. In my contribution I will present the structure of the workshops and an analysis of the materials collected . I will also interrogate the conditions that allowed a generative dialogue between participants maintaining the tension between the different points of view involved