LA TRASPOSIZIONE DIDATTICA NEI FORMATI PEDAGOGICI L’ANALISI DELLA PRATICA PER LA PROFESSIONALIZZAZIONE DEGLI INSEGNANTI

The starting point of this research comes from a true need that has been strongly felt in the current school scenarios by all those who are either involved in or for the system: the teacher training need. The matter is not new, indeed: being updated as a right-duty for the teacher has always been established by contracts, even though through rather generic terms, but in recent times such a topic has reached a more relevant dimension coming into the public and political debate opened about schooling, its quality and the innovation it needs. In fact through the recent Law 107/2015 training has achieved a “compulsory, permanent and structural” character, confirmed by the National Plan for teachers training issued on 3rd October 2016. It is the long-awaited project, the long term organic one, which wants to provide the guidelines both of logistic-organisational kind and of the orientation ones as far as the ways, contents and expertise to be developed are concerned in order to give the teachers an opportunity of professional development suited to the schooling contexts but also to the social ones foreseen for the future. Which models and which training logistics is it necessary to implement in a perspective that is more and more outlined as a lifelong, life-wide, life-deep learning, connecting pre-service training, starting training and in-service training and involving the professional identity as well as the personal one of those involved in the process? Which characters can take on such a training device, starting from which theoretical and methodological lines consistent wit the goals set forth by the decision-makers? This research tries to supply an articulated answer to such questions. First of all teachers training nowadays cannot be declined but in terms of professionalisation (Le Boterf, 2010), starting from a wider idea typical of the teachers’ professionalism, deeply located in the peculiarities and the bonds set forth by the educational contexts. The professional teacher in fact is difficultly describable through declined profiles of expected expertises as he/she works in an ever becoming situation, determined by the logistics of relationship with the students whose answers are hardly foreseeable and categorisable. The teacher is continuously asked to face the unexpected and his/her work tends towards goals that are never the same. The teaching profession in fact does not have in learning a product caused by the act of teaching, but it is characterised as an ongoing activity of mediation and adjustment that has its focus in the didactic action. The teacher therefore must be trained just starting from the analysis and the reflection on the act itself, until the acquisition of a reflexive attitude on the act is undertaken in the personal and professional habit (Magnoler, 2011) of the teacher himself/herself. In addition, as an instructive-prescriptive type of training cannot be imagined today, it is essential to highlight that an organic plan of teachers professionalisation cannot disregard a direct involvement of the teachers themselves. Therefore it is necessary to realise a New Partnership (Nuova Alleanza) planned by Damiano (2006), activating complement and mutual cooperation paths between the school world and the research one. The research project has been planned according to such a perspective, based on a double hypothesis, exactly arising from the double mandate received by the path: - implementing a research/training process aimed at the experimentation of one of the most relevant aspects of the professional profile of the teacher, that is to say the didactic transposition. Such a mandate has become evident in the structuring of Geo-history curriculum. - placing the practice of teaching at the centre of the professionalisation process, starting from the observation and the analysis of the act of teaching, implementing a reflection model on the practices aimed at the teachers’ realisation of the implicit and the underlying meanings of the practice itself. The work plan foresees a first part of contextualisation within categories concerning the professionalisation and the professional development of the teachers, inside the wider framework of the concepts of profession and professionalism, which are contemporarily handed down from the field of the so-called liberal professions to that of the services and the public and social dimensions, among which training and education indeed. It is not possible to trace this way a general image of the competent teacher, who mobilises in the didactic action the necessary resources to sort out the problems, either the known or the unexpected ones, which show themselves in the learning-teaching process. The explored model is the Cooperative Research (Desgagné, 1997) born in Canada in the Nineties, last century, inspired on two principles we have tried to realise through the research/training path: the full cooperation between school and university in order to create community of research that could go beyond the traditional and perceived separation between the world of research and the one of the practice; the valorisation of knowledge inside the practice itself, through a process of analysis and reflection on the action aimed at the clarification of the activated theories belonging to the teachers and to their interpretation and reorganization, in the light of the didactic and subject reference theories. The result of the research, in line with the principle of the double plausibility, could this way lead to the production of useful outcomes both for the school community and the academic one. The second part of the thesis explores the first mandate appointed to research, the investigation on the possibility of structuring in a shared way a new idea of curriculum, starting from the reflection on the reference subject, identified in geo-history (Mattozzi, 2011). The result is the building of a knowledge-tool, dynamic and orientating, working as a theoretical and generative framework for the planning of didactic paths and the teachers’ activities. It is a meeting space between school and research, a place for in-depth analysis and self-training, a guide for interpreting the subject according to the perspective of the deployment of expertises observed vertically. The third part relates to the second mandate of the research, the exploration of the practice to spot transformativity processes that a cooperative training path, focused on the reflexivity in action and on the analysis of the action and the thought of the teachers, could implement (Altet, 2002; 2012). Such a path was structured o two case-studies, a comparative one and a longitudinal one, which enabled to go into deep in the observation and the reflection on the practice, using some devices for the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data organised in a varied and complex protocol: interviews (Vermersch, 2005; Faingold, 2012), video- analysis (Santagata, 2012; 2014), plural analysis (Altet, 2013), co-explicitation on the practices (Vinatier, 2012). The outcome configures itself in the reorganisation of the teacher’s behaviour, who acknowledged reflectiveness as a feature of his/her identity and could test the undertaking of a professional attitude.