Abstract:

In the face of the several crises characterising current society, the role of the University has become more relevant than ever in promoting initiatives that can offer a valid contribution to the community, building proposals to serve emerging needs and weaving profitable links with territorial contexts.

This contribution presents the Culture of Care project, a service research project conceived of and implemented by the Melete center (Center of Ethics for Care) of the University of Verona, which was created to offer effective responses to the educational and training needs expressed by a movement of schools that took shape in the Italian context. This project has its roots in the pragmatist tradition, according to which the task of research is to provide something good for a community. To be relevant, research must investigate a significant problem, adopting a rigorous method that guarantees the reliability of the data to be returned to the community to disseminate evidence-based practices.

Therefore, in accordance with the vision of a University that puts itself at the service of the community, the researchers of Melete proposed some meetings that were open to the municipal department and to schools of all grades of the city of Bergamo, in which the needs and/or desires for service were collected. Starting from the needs analysis, the necessity emerged of activating project proposals to promote the culture of care in the educational and didactic contexts of the requesting schools. Proposals focused on education for care were developed and co-constructed with the actors involved and divided according to specific contextual needs into three paths: ethics education (care for oneself and others), education for citizenship (care for the common good) and socio-emotional education (care for one's own and others' feelings).

The proposals were designed and implemented according to the evaluative research approach. This aims to offer good experiences to the subjects involved while evaluating their effectiveness through rigorous qualitative research.

According to the service approach, the activities conducted were documented in detail for lifelong learning training purposes and presented at a conference open to the territory. In this way, the research was put at the service of the political decision maker and returned to the territory so it could become a foundation for training and direction choices.

The process of data analysis, still ongoing, displays the effectiveness of the project. Depending on the different proposals, it indicates an increase in the ethical, citizenship, reflective and socio-emotional skills of the students involved.

The positive impact of the initiative also emerged from the positive evaluations of the teachers involved, revealed thanks to the qualitative analysis of the interviews addressing them at the end of the educational paths. In addition, the schools involved requested the continuation of the project, as did other schools nationwide. Moreover, a proposal was received from Melete to activate a collaboration to implement similar initiatives in the US and Australian contexts.

This contribution is relevant because it exemplifies how the University, acting according to the service research approach, can become an engine generating new experiential, cultural and professional knowledge and practices, supporting the community to achieve a common good.

Keywords:

University, service research, evaluative research, culture of care, schools, ethics education, citizenship education, socio-emotional education.