What is the link between knowledge about education and knowledge about oneself as an educator? What connects these two dimensions at a deep level, beyond the technicalities of a professional culture? This is not only a problem of training the individual professional, but also a social and political problem. Today, the knowledge of the affections in the educational and care professions continues to be undervalued and its avoidance poses urgent problems concerning the possibility of adopting new outlooks, new visions and new gestures to go through the great educational emergencies of our time. To train to the affects and with the affects does not only concern the relationship that each educator has with his history, but also his posture within the service in which he works thought in relation to the cultures of services and institutions.   If professionalisation is an objective that orients know-how, it is difficult for know-how to be included. Today we are witnessing a gap between a ratio that wants to be all-encompassing and which, if taken as the only criterion, polarises thinking and feeling as two dichotomic dimensions that are hard to recompose; emotions are essential matrices of a conscious thought on education and cannot be reduced to a mere corollary. Only if they are thought of in an integrated way and in a dynamic interweaving is it possible to safeguard the conditions of emotional well-being of individuals, groups and services. Without the development of the affective component, educational thinking is impoverished and there is a risk of a drift towards emotional illiteracy that weighs on the subjectivation capacity of the new generations as well as on the conditions for exercising a critical and conscious education in educational services and, more generally, in civil society.

Starting from a pedagogical dialogue, developed in a trans-disciplinary perspective, the course will reflect on the relationship between the culture of affects and educational practices as well as on the formative conditions that allow the educator to learn from his own history. The course will also explore the contribution of the "awareness of affects" in the development of the process of subjectivation of children and adolescents and the training conditions that allow an educational professional to prevent, through personal and group emotional growth, the forms of tacit violence that may lie hidden in the folds of everyday gestures in the different contexts in which the educator works (community work, work at school and / or in the home etc. ...). The course will also address the need that educators experience to regain possession of a practice of the living word and a responsive testimony, where even the personal and professional history of the educator becomes an experience of care both on a personal level and on a "political" posture oriented to a critical thinking and to the development of practices attentive to the growth of the human being in services and in civil society.