EDITORIAL - DIFFICULTIES ARE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

Abstract

In introducing some analyses on the topics addressed by the various authors, it is essential to make some considerations on the problems of pedagogy and didactics in emergency conditions. It is difficult to focus attention on the topic because the concept of “emergency” is broad and indefinite. To this must be added the conditions of gravity and urgency. Educational inter- vention in the context of natural disasters, wars and, as has happened recently, pandemics is, unfortunately, underestimated and consequently the possibility of timely intervention is denied. This has important repercussions on the socio-educational pathway and on affective-education-

al relationships, particularly in the population in the developing age (Isidori, 2010). Developing and testing models of educational intervention with emergency-related peculi- arities cannot ignore the natural hybridization between established disciplinary areas such as education, special education, neuroscience and applied sciences. The latter are “disciplines of action” with the aim of studying, preventing and treating the psychic, behavioral and emotional processes that occur during and after critical events, with evident effects also from the educa-

tional point of view.
It is necessary to develop techniques that can be applied to situations that, due to their

extraordinariness and gravity, cannot be tackled with the resources already available and with classical methods.

The individual person and the community are the objects of study and intervention of emer- gency pedagogy. In the first case we try to re-establish and make the emotional and cognitive homeostasis of the individual, destructured by the condition caused by trauma, last over time. In the second hypothesis we intervene on the community to manage all the psycho-social phenom- ena that develop in different groups (Morsanuto, Cipollone, Gramiccia, Peluso Cassese, 2020).

Another reflection on emergency situations is linked to their characteristic of projecting individuals and social groups into a state of marginality. It is an “existential category”, directly proportional to the duration and magnitude of the emergency, in which people do not perceive the fullness of their rights (such as the ability to freely choose where and how to live), but find themselves living and feeling outside the margins of ordinary everyday life, both in terms of time and space (Isidori, 2010).

It is fundamental, therefore, to review the role of the environment in the formation of a subject. This involves questioning the interpretative category of necessity, transforming it into a possibility, so that it is the keystone for understanding the surrounding reality and the planning of educational and didactic interventions.