Marsico G., (2018). Cultivating New Ideas in Cultural Psychology of Education. In G. Marsico and L. Tateo, (Eds.). The Emergence of Self in Educational Contexts. Theoretical and empirical explorations, Cultural Psychology of Education, 8, (pp.v-vii), Cham, CH: Springer;

The best think that can happen to a scholar is that someone else takes her idea and elaborates it further. Replication, reification and even taking care lead to no further theoretical advancement, since they tend to maintain the orthodoxy of the original formulation. The most faithful student makes the worse service to the teacher, since she may merely reproduce or echo the teacher’s voice. New ideas will emerge only in the process or cannibalization, dissection and remaking. Thus, just “taking care” is not enough for the process of science making. What we need is “cultivating” new possibilities to understand the phenomenon under investigation (Buner, 2007; Marsico, 2015). This is exactly what happened in the last decade to the construct of Educational Self, which is the core of the present volume, and one of the promising new concepts in the field of Cultural Psychology of Education (Marsico, 2017). Its initial elaboration occurred more than ten years ago in a research project focused on the Italian school-family meetings and the school assessment (Marsico & Iannaccone, 2012; Iannaccone, Marsico and Tateo, 2013).