Luigina Mortari

In a context of individualism, conflictual language, and scarce ethical passion, understanding how students co-construct meaning through dialogue is urgent. Teachers from primary to secondary school need tools to grasp these dynamics. This contribution presents the Instrument of Discursive Analysis, a research-validated heuristic tool grounded in the Empirical Phenomenological Method, capturing discursive acts and conversational moves in classroom dialogue. Adaptable to daily use, it supports observing verbal exchanges and characterizing the group-class discursive profile. An example from its implementation in a student Socratic conversation on ethical concepts is presented.

The development of social and emotional competences is a crucial aspect of human flourishing. These competences, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, interpersonal skills and responsible decision-making, have been found to demonstrate effective improvements through social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. An analysis of the recent literature on emerging SEL approaches was conducted to provide an overview of current educational proposals, highlighting their strong and critical areas and outlining the lingering challenges, particularly in terms of the necessity to define the theoretical foundations of the programs with utmost clarity and conduct rigorous research on their effectiveness. In light of the aforementioned considerations, this article presents an innovative SEL program entitled The Nous Project that responds to the recommendations highlighted in the literature. Developed for primary school children, The Nous Project is based on a philosophically-grounded theory of socio-emotional education, which primarily focuses on the role of emotional self-understanding. Consequently, the primary objective of The Nous Project is to foster students’ knowledge of their own emotional dimensions and their ability to understand their own emotions. This is achieved by involving them in keeping a reflective diary, where they write down their emotions and analyse them on the basis of a metaphor. The effectiveness of this activity will be discussed starting from the presentation of the findings emerged from the qualitative analysis of the diaries collected during the pilot implementation of the program.

The chapter describes what doing research on educational experience means, focusing in particular on the approach of the research for children, that implies the implementation of an educational experience aimed at fostering the participants’ flourishing and the realization of a qualitative research aimed at studying in a rigorous way its effectiveness. Ethical postures characterizing the research for children approach, research questions, instruments of data collection and the principles of the phenomenological method followed for the data analysis are presented in this chapter.

Starting with a description of the ethical crisis that characterizes the present time, the introduction presents the rationale of the book, pointing out the necessity of a care-based approach to virtue ethics education and the possibility to outline it starting from a deep examination of ancient philosophy put in dialogue with contemporary care thinking. In introducing their proposal, the authors highlight the importance of a recursive dialogue between theory, practice and research in education. On the basis of this premise, the structure of the book, precisely presenting a theoretical part and an empirical part in dialogue with each other, is described. At the end of the introduction, the authors argue the claim that care, conceived as a practice nurtured by virtues, is the ethical approach that should be promoted in schools in order to face the current ethical crisis, and the MelArete programme demonstrates how such care-based virtue ethics education theory can be applied successfully.

The chapter discusses the meaning of the concept “good” and the difficulty, as well as the necessity, to search for it, and then argues the Socratic statement according to which the major good for a human being is “to talk every day about virtue”.

The chapter presents and discusses different typologies of activities and instruments to foster ethical development, and in particular to encourage the children to reflect on virtues in the perspective of care. In particular, MelArete encourages children to think starting from stories, to reason and dialogues with others, to keep a diary of virtues and to be involved in reflective, creative and playful activities.

This final chapter brings together the results of the theoretical and empirical sections, proposing a dialogical synthesis of them. Developing conclusions about the MelArete project, authors highlight how the collected data do not only clearly show that children are capable to reflect on fundamental issues for the realization of a good life for oneself and with/for others, but also that the lexicon of the ethics of care is capable to enlighten their life, in order to orient their everyday choices. At the end of the chapter, some children’s thoughts highlighting how they link care and virtues are presented.