Practicing Openness. Five axes for a shared, possible and sustainable school

This contribution is inscribed in the wake of studies and research recognizing the importance of promoting educational and schooling experiences that generate ecological relationships with the world (Mortari, 2020; Bianchi et al., 2022), and enhancing the potential inherent in contexts beyond the traditional classroom (MacQuarrie, 2018), and acknowledging the arts as languages fostering the development of expressive and creative potential in individuals, relationships and groups (Antonacci, Berni, 2024). Specifically, we intend to bear witness to a research project - funded by the Ministry of University and Research as part of the Piano Operativo Nazionale PON “Ricerca e Innovazione” 2014-2020 Axis IV. This Project is rooted in a theoretical and methodological framework traceable in the Una scuola Manifesto (Antonacci, Guerra, 2018), aimed at promoting ecological reflections and practices in the encounter between the world of school and beyond. It is in a school context that is no longer objectified, but interrogated, recognized and valued in the generative and intimate relationship between the environment and the subjects that pass through it, that we believe the premises can be laid to initiate educational and schooling pathways in which the dimension of the Open is recognized as a harbinger of change and transformation, as much in teachers’ design thoughts as in their habitual school practices. In this respect, the project examines the relationships between the different actors inhabiting the school daily - teachers, pupils, parents, principals, universities, associative bodies, and institutions - and the potential for relationships between the classroom and the territory. The project also focuses on educational styles in their redefinition when teaching takes place outside the traditional classroom; on the languages of disciplinary knowledge, with specific reference to artistic ones, in dialogue with those more usual in the school; on outdoor contexts, from the closest to the wildest and most natural ones; and finally, on planning and assessment tools, understood as possibilities in their green and outdoor translation. Within this framework, the research aims to outline roadmaps for rethinking the school form as a pedagogical device of openness to the world, a space of life where the future unfolds as a desire capable of orienting and transforming the present (Bloch, 2019).