Dall’idea di scuola all’idea di docente: percorsi storici, riflessioni pedagogiche

Who is the teacher nowadays, which task is he required to fulfil, which categories found his role? What is the subjective perception of the teacher figure in the collective imagination? A quality school, a Good school, depends essentially, apart from its organisation, its planning power, its attractive-communicative methods, on the presence of good teachers. Can the idea of school determine the idea of teacher or can the latter transcend the historical contingencies and have an own specificity, capable of “biting the reality”? Nowadays, the recentralisation of teacher professionalism, which refuses to coincide with mere learning processes as well as to result in them ‘tout court’, appears a pedagogical fact that forces to confront with a range of diachronic developed and synchronic conceivable teacher ‘profiles’. If, on the one hand, the choice of the term ‘profile’ represents the attempt to avoid the risk of a strict modelisation that would not acknowledge the complexity of the teaching action, hardly ‘closable’ in an improbable range of cases, on the other hand it represents the attempt to recover and reintroduce that ‘face’ metaphor, so dear to Cesare Scurati, which allows us to note originality and unrepeatability of the professional teaching experience. In fact, through his own face, every teacher expresses uniqueness, singularity and specificity of being a man and of being an educator-man. So, with the awareness that no representation or ideal type can ‘individually’ inform a ‘good teacher’ model, an attempt will be made to grasp, through a diachronic analysis, a profile-idea of teacher capable of intercepting the “signs of time” and of comprehending, facing, challenging and transcending them