Rethinking the category of educational relationship. A deweyan perspective.

My task as speaker in this conference is to focus on a significant category within the field of discourse which characterizes my area of expertise, trying to reconstruct it through a process of inquiry, developed within a pragmatist or post-pragmatist framework. In order to accomplish my task i have therefore selected a specific category, which I have identified as the category of "educational relationship", and analyze it using both an inquiry pattern and a conceptual framework validated within the pragmatist tradition. I have therefore used Dewey's model of the process of inquiry as a methodological tool to explore and re-define the above mentioned category using some deweyan conceptual tools and argumentative procedures, in order to provide it with a new meaning and to re-contextualize it within nowadays' educational discourse. In particular, I have used the deweyan ideas of "education" intended as a process of "growth" continuous reconstruction and reorganization of human experience as described in Democracy and Education; of "experience", as esplored in what I would define his "trilogy" of experience (Art as Experience, Experience and Nature, Experience and Education); of "transaction" as explored in Knowing and The Known).