In itinere. Per una pedagogia dell'erranza

The tension of always heading towards a goal, the anxiety of achieving a result can make life a linear, breathless race, rather than a winding and discontinuous path. So in this manner you can lose the richness of detail along the way. As complexity and uncertainty increase, so does the desire for control and planning: pedagogical reflection, if not faithful to true life, by its very nature unpredictable and erratic, is likely to offer only a set of predetermined paths. Starting from an analysis of the profile of the homo viator and the different ways of being ‘on the road’, this volume sets out the conditions in which wandering can be said to be educational and offers the reader deep and original keys of interpretation to review their experiences, keeping together, as complementary and contiguous parts, light and shadow, error and change, rigor and creativity. The legitimacy of making mistakes, the value of progressing ‘step by step’, the need to make a start and to then let go of the wheel, the importance of walking together, and the fruitfulness of the unexpected are some of the themes explored and supported by wandering, which is expressed at the same time as both existential metaphor and training method. Educators, psychologists, social workers, teachers and parents will all find in these pages suggestions and prompts to reconsider their care and educational work from a new perspective, discovering themselves in itinere. Whoever, therefore, feels like a traveler, in search of the meaning of their own existence, can undertake this wandering, can start or reinvigorate their journey or even find the courage to bring it to a conclusion.