Learning outcomes

The course general formative aim is to explain how the educational experience might be understood and lived through the particular model of knowledge which is hermeneutics. As a consequence, we need to explain a new discipline, the pedagogical hermeneutics. This is a discipline in the tradition of the pedagogical thought belonging to the educational philosophy – right in the middle of it is the study of the relation among education, pedagogy and philosophical thought.
Some specific formative objects spring from this general aim. They are expressed as results of what has been learnt.
- The first formative object refers to the comprehension of education as an object of hermeneutic interpretation; that requires the knowledge of philosophic hermeneutics and its communication in new disciplinary terms: at the end of the course the student will have a sufficient knowledge of the contents and will be able to contextualize them in the hermeneutic history and in the pedagogic communication.
- The second formative object refers to the capacity of reading an educational problem from the hermeneutic point of view – for instance the problem of truth – in order to unify every new piece of knowledge within one’s own personal culture and to make professional application of it.
- The third formative object refers to the capacity of setting the hermeneutic model in the research and action pattern context which characterize the contemporary pedagogical thought, in order to autonomously evaluate the pros and cons of the pedagogical hermeneutics.
- The forth formative object refers to the development of the communicative ability: at the end of the course the student will be able to use the hermeneutic language within an educational and pedagogical context.

Program

Contents
The course will mainly deal with the following topics.
Principal contents of the general part:
- Education as a hermeneutic problem
- Elements of hermeneutic history: from classic age to Dilthey;
- Nineteenth Century hermeneutics: Heidegger, Gadamer e Ricoeur;
- From hermeneutic reflection to the educational practice;
- The pedagogical hermeneutics and other pedagogical paradigm of thought;

Principal contents of the ”monographic” part (of the developing part of the course):
- a fundamental educational and philosophic problem: truth;
- philosophic theories on truth and the experience of truth on education;
- Pareyson: the relation between interpretation and truth;
- Some elements for a plan of education to “truth”.

Texts for the exam
Mandatory for everybody: General part of the course:
- D. Loro, Elementi di Ermeneutica pedagogica. Lecture notes, 2012-2013. (The “lecture” is available by the Cartoleria Ateneo, Lungadige Porta Vittoria, 37).

Central part (monographic part) (developing part of the course):
- H. Gardner, Verità, bellezza, bontà. Educare alle virtù nel ventunesimo secolo, Milano, ed. Feltrinelli, 2011.
- M. Zambrano, Per l’amore e per la libertà. Scritti sulla filosofia e sull’educazione, Milano-Genova, ed. Marietti, 2008, pp. 101-161.

Teaching methods
Lessons will be frontal in the main, with the possibility to intervene with questions and short debates related to the themes of the day.

Examination Methods

Students will be examined in the oral form, following the line of their entry to the exam. They will be assessed according to their level of learning what it is expected in the specific formative objects.
They are asked to answer questions, of different types: descriptive (to show the knowledge of the contents), argumentative (to show the capacity of associating concepts and of reflection ),applicative (to show the ability of concrete and active thinking on the theoretical contents).
The capacity of efficient communication will be also evaluated by the quality of the written task, which must be correct both grammatically and graphically.
N.B. Each year the programme of the course is updated in its fundamental contents, compared to the earlier years, so, it is scientifically and didactically correct that students enrolled in previous years prepare their exams on the programme of the current academic year, except for those who previously communicate to the teacher their serious reasons for not doing so.