Educational Self. A fruitful idea?

The school is the first and one of the most significant experiences in the individual's life outside the family. It is thus not exaggeration to say that the history of educational experiences plays a crucial role in the construction of the Self (Bruner, 1996). Every educational institution is the expression of a given culture and will tend to transmit, reproduce and cultivate knowledge, beliefs, norms of conduct and even emotions on the basis of which students interpret the natural and social world. Even the idea of Self, with its limits and characteristics, is typical of a given culture. School therefore contributes to the formation of the student's Self in such a way as to fit with the cultural requirements: for instance, the emphasis on the values of individuality rather than affiliation, the role of agency and individual effort rather than cooperation, etc. (Bruner, 1996). This is the starting point of the reflection that led to the idea of Educational Self, introduced and theoretically developed in this chapter, considered as a specific dimension of the Self, a regulatory process emerging from the experiencing of the I-Other relationship (Bakhtin, 1986) in the educational context (Iannaccone & Marsico, 2007). Twentieth century psychology has often adopted the Self and the Identity as important objects of study (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007). The relationship between Self and Identity, their development, stability and consistency and their nature of social and cultural objects have been stressed from different perspectives by Baldwin (1898), Erikson (1980), Mead (1934) and Hermans (1996) to mention but a few authors. Although these scholars have provided different definitions of Self and Identity, considering them sometimes as separated entities and sometimes as synonyms, some shared ideas can be understood as basic dimensions of the Self. First, the Self is a sense of consistency and awareness, a process rather than an “entity” located somewhere “inside” the person. Second, the Self is related to the symbolic nature and the semiotic activity of human beings. With respect to the social experiences of the individual, the Self can be considered an dynamical organisation of the various identities of the person. These identities are made up of an internalised set of meanings, knowledge, concepts, beliefs attached to the person's role in the network of social relationships in a given context and at a given moment of his/her life (Stryker, Owens, & White, 2000; Tajfel, 1981). Starting from these general remarks, we will now focus on a specific topic: the socio-genesis of Self, the relevance of school experiences in the emergence of Self and the contribution of these experiences to the definition of lifespan identity.