Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to examine, through the description of a research carried out with university students, how the integration between contemplative pedagogy and critical pedagogy can represent a rich soil that promotes, in educational formal, informal and non formal contexts, not just a deep insight into meaning, ethics and goals and values, but social and educational action adequately supported by reflexivity and awareness of the action itself.Supporting, in fact, both the thought about our inner experience and our interdependence with the others, contemplative pedagogy proposes, beside traditional ‘third-person’ academic approaches, a ‘critically-based first.person’ approach grounded on practical experience, with techniques and methods providing an integrated understanding of the subject’s role by building the thought and the contemplative experience in the society and on individuals.On the other hand, critical pedagogy, praxis-based
combines to a declared educational intent of social change, the necessary introspective ability, so that many educators traceable to this field show aspects characterized by reflective depth and introspection that also reaches contemplative features.This integration tells us first that, in the complex educational field, contemplation mustn’t be considered, as in the common sense one might think, disconnected from action. And that not reflective action can be even counterproductive, or in any case lead to situations hard to handle, unless it has adequate reflective tools. It’s therefore essential to think in an integrated way contemplative pedagogy and critical pedagogy, as such dialogue would allow students to knowingly understand the relationships between action and reflection, starting from the theoretical foundations that contemplative practices should be considered such as embodied wisdom, useful to the comprehension of social reality.In fact, contemplative practices possess many tools to work on opening up to newness, sensibility to different contexts, explicit the implicit, trough the awareness of multiple perspectives.This last element enables us to emphasize our relationship with other people without minimizing differences of identity and experience, as the contact with ‘here-and-now’ that helps us growing a subjective and social consciousness essential to support the complexity and the difficulty of interpersonal relationships.
Specifically, the research used a mixed convergent parallel quantitative methodology: university students took part to a lab about contemplative practices carried out within LEPE activities, the Epistemological Lab of educational practices, carried out at the University of Naples "Federico II". Following the workshop, the students were able to reflect about the experience both through the drafting of a logbook, and by compiling a detailed questionnaire built ad hoc and aimed at promoting a metacognitive and critical work on the contemplative practices from part of them.
Experience. As far as data processing is concerned, a first analysis was led according to the phenomenological method to identify the emerging categories within the narratives. An analysis of the textual content supported by the use of the T-Lab software was then accomplished.
Later, the data emerged from the analysis of the logbooks has been integrated by the data emerged from the in-depth questionnaire.

Keywords:

Critical pedagogy, contemplative pedagogy, reflexivity, praxis.