Full Professor of Didactics and Special Pedagogy, Department of Education, Roma Tre University, he coordinates the Degree Course in Science of Primary Education, directs the Specialization Course for Support Teacher’s training, coordinates the Research Laboratory for the Development of Scholastic and Social Inclusion and is a member of the Ph.D. board in Educational and Social Theory and Research.
He teaches Inclusive Didactics, Inclusive Pedagogy and Disability Studies, Laboratory of Creative Expression, and Special Pedagogy. He is a founding member of the Italian Society of Special Pedagogy (SIPeS), of which he is currently on the Steering Committee, and he is a member of the pedagogical societies SIPED, SIREM, and SIRD. The research interests focus on the epistemological issues of Special Pedagogy, inclusive processes in school, university, and in society, on teacher training, on the history of the education of the disabled, on the social representations of disability and diversity, and on creativity. He is the author of 300 scientific publications.
EDUCATING CREATIVITY IN NON-FORMAL CONTEXT TO CREATIVELY TRANSFORM FORMAL EDUCATION
After the experience of the Pandemic caused by the SARS-COV2 virus, the fundamental need to educate in creative thinking, to train people to live in unknown and unprecedented situations with the ability to be prepared not to be prepared, clearly appeared. An issue already addressed in the final document of the Council of the European Union (May 27, 2015) entitled Council conclusions on the role of early childhood education and primary education in fostering creativity, innovation and digital competence, but which in the last three years it has taken on a real emergency value.
The question from which we start our presentation and which we will try to develop as an argument in our intervention is how we can enhance what people learn in non-formal contexts so that they can become the lever to transform the formal training system, to ultimately give life to what Ken Robinson has defined Changing Education Paradigm. To do this, also referring to some great scholars (Guilford, 1950; Anderson, 1972; Fromm, 1972; May, 1972; Maslow, 1972; Rogers, 1972; Mencarelli, 1972; Beaudot, 1983; Mazzotta, 1990; Gardner, 1994; De Bono, 2000; De Masi, 2003; Resnick, 2018; Csíkszentmihályi, 2023) we will try to define the ability think creatively not an extraordinary act, the prerogative of a few individuals, but a universal factor, a profound need in terms of personal right to develop the potential that exists in each one and, therefore, social, which invests the whole humanity. In other words, a faculty of faculties, expression of possible human expressions (Bocci, 2004), which is activated/not through the infinite interactions that all people, none excluded, establish with themselves, with the activities they undertake, with the physical and relational environment in which they are immersed and with the conditions in which and for which they find themselves acting (Bocci, 2004; 2012; 2019).