Abstract:

This paper presents an action-research which has been carried out within the framework of the University Laboratory of Education to listening, which was founded some years ago by the research group of the Laboratory of Epistemologies and Educational Practices of the Department of Humanities at University of Naples “Federico II”. The Laboratory of Education to listening involves undergraduate students in structured pathways: they are future psychologists who attend the academic course of Social Pedagogy.

During the last edition, carried out in the Academic Year 2013-2014, more than sixty students attended it. The real innovation of this project is that during the academic time, within formal educational settings, in university classroom, undergraduate students had the possibility to experience the connections between music, body, attention to the others, empathy, silence and sounds. They could develop skills to meaningful listening, creativeness and critical thinking, and could gain awareness of themselves and of their perspectives of meaning. The whole experience could be an experience of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991;Taylor, Cranton, 2013), thanks to which students may question their points of view, and may acquire new skills for reflection to be inserted within their knowledge. The activities of the Laboratory of Education to Listening are not a sort of Music Therapy, because they aimed to an educational and formative purpose. The methodologies which were used are exercises of attention to themselves and the others, exercises of imagination and of mindfulness, exercises for hand writing mechanism, sound dramatization, musical autobiography, hypertexts, methodologies of the Theatre of the Oppressed (Strollo, Vittoria, 2012).

We adopted a semi-structured questionnaire to evaluate and assess students’ changes and improvements in a test-retest study, and we compared the results with the textual analysis of the narrative logbooks of the students, in order to demonstrate that these laboratory experiences are able to introduce students to a familiarity with the exercise of reflection (De Mennato, 2012), through which they can learn to take themselves subjects/objects of their knowledge and can become “reflective practitioners” (Schön, 2005). The Laboratory activities are finalized to promote a “good-thinking” (Morin, 2000), that requires an apprenticeship to complex thinking, capable of distinguishing, contextualizing, and accepting uncertainty, and to show a contribute to the development of methodologies for an "education to reflexivity", within university laboratories.

References:
[1] Taylor, E.W., Cranton, P. (2013). A theory in progress? Issues in transformative learning theory European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 4, 1, 2013.
[2] Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
[3] Strollo M.R., Vittoria P. (2012). A formação de educadores através de percursos estéticos: teatro, musica e narração. In: VI Colloquio internacional de filosofia da educacao. filosofar: aprender e ensinar.Rio de Janeiro, 15-17/8/2012, p. 1-14, Rio de Janeiro:uerj/maracanà.
[4] De Mennato, P. (2012). Medical Professionalism and Reflexivity. Examples of training to the sense of “duty” in medicine. Educational Reflective Practices, 2, 2012.
[6] Schön, D.A. (2005). Formare il professionista riflessivo. Milano: FrancoAngeli.
[7] Morin, E. (2000). La testa ben fatta. Milano: Cortina.

Keywords:

University Laboratory Experiences, Innovative Educational Practices, New Teaching Models.