Abstract
The project aims to create a peer training community for faculty development, dedicated to innovative relationship-centred teaching. The specific objectives are: (1) to carry out a national mapping of university didactics centred on relationality; (2) to theoretically define the new categories emerging from the surveyed practices; (3) starting from the identified realities, to network an open peer education community (digital, free and public) where the sharing of practices fuels further research initiatives and innovative action. The relevance of the proposal is dictated by the current didactic shortcomings of university teaching. The COVID emergency has highlighted the fragility of universities; in fact, it has shown that the reflection on didactic innovation in Italian universities focuses on training in the use of technological tools and neglects deeper pedagogical foundations. This approach has proved to be very limited, since, on average, university teachers adopt a didactic approach based on the transmission of content (or technical-scientific training) that is inadequate and ignore the training of students' soft skills. The consequences are: (1) the education of university students is disconnected from the demands of soft skills required by the social and economic environments and (2) the university is unprepared to integrate the growing number of freshmen with educational debts. This generates the urgent need for a more conscious pedagogy that improves the university's ability to compensate for the shortcomings derived from high school and to adapt to the socio-economic community of which it is a part. A single project cannot aim to solve the educational deficiencies that university students are accumulating, but it can trigger a paradigm shift to address them more successfully than has been the case so far. The project responds to the aforementioned shortcomings with originality because: (1) it adopts an interdisciplinary didactic, pedagogical and anthropological approach that challenges the current theoretical categories that are proving insufficient; (2) it enhances the university teacher as a pedagogically active figure of facilitator of the learning process in a shared mode, and not only as a provider of knowledge as is the case now; (3) differently from the current academic paradigm, it pays specific attention to the relationships between teachers and students, understood as the student's human training for conscious social living; (4) it avoids the traditional top-down approach of Italian faculty development in favour of a peer-to-peer and bottom-up approach that is more motivating and lasting for those involved; (5) it puts relationships at the forefront of teaching innovation, compensating for the almost exclusive centrality given to means and tools; hence it questions the improper exclusive equation between educational innovation and the use of technology.
Results achieved
The University of Bologna Research Unit contributed to the project by developing an integrated programme of ethnographic research, theoretical reflection, and scientific design, aimed at exploring university teaching as a relational and situated practice. Drawing on an anthropological perspective, the Unit investigated teaching and learning not merely as processes of knowledge transmission, but as social, relational, and transformative practices. In doing so, it contributed to the development of an innovative theoretical framework for the study of higher education teaching. The research was carried out through an ethnographic investigation of situated teaching practices across national and international higher education contexts. Rather than simply documenting innovative experiences, the aim was to understand the processes, relationships, and emerging categories underlying these practices by bringing into dialogue experiences from different disciplinary and educational settings. This investigation led to the development of an anthropological interpretation of situated teaching, demonstrating that educational innovation depends not primarily on the introduction of new tools or technologies, but on the quality of educational relationships, participation, and the collaborative construction of learning processes. Building upon this empirical work, the Research Unit contributed to the theoretical elaboration of the interpretative categories that emerged from the study, providing the conceptual framework that informed both the development of the national repository of situated teaching practices and the Open Education platform created within the project. Alongside its research activities, the University of Bologna played a key role in fostering a national and international research network dedicated to the study of situated and relational learning. This network was consolidated through the international conference Learning through Differences: The Possibilities of Everyday Life, held on 3 October 2024 at the Umberto Eco International Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Bologna. The conference brought together internationally renowned scholars, including Jean Lave (Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley), Ana Gomes (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte), and Dorte Kousholt and Line Lerche Mørck (Aarhus University). The event provided an important opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue and laid the foundations for new international research collaborations, which subsequently resulted in the publication of New Space for Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2026). The Bologna Research Unit also organised the thematic panel From the Classroom to the Field, the Classroom as Field: Ethnography and Applied and Interdisciplinary Anthropology of Learning in Higher Education, held during the National Conference of the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology (SIAA) in December 2024. The panel brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and paving the way for a collective publication dedicated to situated teaching practices. Among the project’s principal scholarly outputs is the open-access volume Experiences of Situated Teaching: University Education between Research and Third Mission (Editpress, Florence, 2026), which brings together ethnographic accounts, theoretical reflections, and case studies developed throughout the research. This publication is complemented by the forthcoming article Outside the Frame: Error, Conflict, and Creativity between Anthropology and Design, which examines an interdisciplinary teaching experience exploring the relationships between learning, anthropology, design, and processes of transformation. The University of Bologna also played a leading role in the scientific design of the project’s digital platform. The Research Unit contributed to the conceptual architecture of the repository, the design of the website mock-up, the drafting and revision of the platform’s contents, and the integration between the digital platform and the Open Education environment, ensuring coherence between the project’s digital infrastructure and its scientific objectives. In parallel, the Unit collaborated with the other partner institutions in the development of the repository, contributing to the selection, classification, and continuous updating of national and international scholarly literature, while integrating teaching experiences and theoretical perspectives from different disciplinary fields. This work resulted in the creation of a shared knowledge base designed to support the further development of both the research programme and the broader scholarly community engaged in innovation in higher education. Overall, the University of Bologna Research Unit contributed to repositioning anthropology at the centre of contemporary debates on higher education, demonstrating that educational innovation cannot be reduced to technological change but requires a fundamental rethinking of educational relationships, situated learning, and the collaborative production of knowledge.Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Roberta Bonetti
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà
Coordinatore:
Università degli Studi di MILANO(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 67.590,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
15/10/2023
Data di fine:
14/10/2025
