EDITORIAL - RESEARCH ON EDUCATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE

Abstract

This volume collects the proceedings of the international conference Research on Educational Neuroscience, School, Sports & Society, held in virtual mode on March 30 and 31, 2021. After two decades of pioneering work in brain research, the educational community has actually begun to realize that "understanding it" can help open up new pathways for improving educational research, policy, and practice.

This work brings together contributions that synthesize advances in the approach to brain-based learning and use it to address key issues for the educational community. In doing so, it does not offer simple explanations or claim that brain-based learning is a panacea designed to overcome every educational or pedagogical problem.

A new scenery clearly emerges, proving a change in perspective with respect to the past. More than thirty years ago, humanistic culture and scientific culture were separated by a "wall of incomprehension", mainly due to rigid epistemologies, different languages, irreconcilable research methods: detachment and general skepticism characterized the approach of educational sciences towards scientific contributions based on the analysis of biological factors, considered too distant from the world of education focused, legitimately, on a humanistic-philosophical object of investigation, framing the theme of cognition far from the body and biology.

From the 1990s onwards, the debate between the two "cultures" went through a dialectical and phenomenological phase. In that period a theoretical reflection on the epistemological gnosological redefinition of pedagogy, starting from the contribution of neuroscience, was started by Elisa Frauenfelder; her text "Pedagogy and biology, a possible alliance", represented for the Italian community an important step in the evolution of the relationship between pedagogy and neuroscience, marking the overcoming of the initial reductionist vision, refuting any form of separatism.

REN Conference has represented, therefore, a valuable opportunity and testimony in this sense, because it has allowed many scholars, belonging to different scientific fields, to dialogue constructively, with the intent to better understand the cultural interdependencies, thanks to the intellectual vivacity of neuroscience, as a methodological glue useful to bring back the studies to a circular dimension of practice-theory-practice, as well as to lay the foundations for a unique culture on human.

A further important step has been taken to overcome methodological reductionism and linear logic, orienting approaches towards an integrated, multi and trans-disciplinary dimension, capable of grasping and dealing effectively with the complexity of educational contexts.