Vol.

LXV
No. 1/2013

72 - 84

Towards School 2.0: Facilitated Maieutic Dialogue

Alfredo Panerai*
Sciences of Education Department, University of Firenze, Italy

Abstract
The aim of the article is to stress the urgent need for change in schools educational-didactic approach, whose core
component appears not to have altered in the last few centuries and to be the same in all countries. This core is the
principle of authority expressed in a highly asymmetrical educational relationship, founded on the monopolisation
of communication by the teacher and on a teaching system operating through a one-to-many channel, which leaves
students very little freedom and opportunity for participation.
Through the internet, todays youngsters are looking for constant contact with their peers, self-expression, and
opportunities to create and share knowledge. So the ability to manage this type of process is important for todays
teachers, irrespective of the presence or otherwise of an IT tool: in other words, teachers need to acquire the skills
and practical techniques to manage learning groups in a participatory environment, to become experts in
coordinating a Facilitated Maieutic Dialogue.
Keywords: school and conservation; internet 2.0; participatory teaching; knowledge building; maieutic dialogue

1. Introduction
Countless publications examine the social repercussions of the spread of the internet and, in
particular, the recent emergence of social networks and other platforms enabling users to produce
and share data; studies on their pedagogic implications are also beginning to appear.
For the most part, however, these pedagogic studies simply advocate greater use of
information technology in schools or recommend programs that would be useful for teachers.
This article takes a different approach; through an analysis of classical pedagogic literature and a
comparison of constructivist psychology and recent studies on group facilitation with the
experiments on reciprocal maieutics of sociologist-activist-educator Danilo Dolci, it proposes
a revolutionary vision of the educational relationship inspired by certain aspects of the network
lifestyle of todays youngsters: sharing, self-expression, creativity.
The vision proposed here, however, is in conflict with a serious and entrenched problem in
schools, which is the starting point for this article.
2. The problem
The Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie and the
development of the workers movement, the world wars and decolonisation, the theory of
relativity and the emergence of the social sciences, the holocaust and nuclear bombs, the cold
war and the economic boom, the United Nations and human rights, the 1968 student and worker
movements and emancipation, the triumph of neo-liberalism and the fall of the Eastern regimes,
the South American dictatorships and US neo-imperialism, international terrorism and the clash
of civilisations.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: alfredo.panerai@unifi.it

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How many upheavals the world has experienced in the last few centuries! Events that have not
only transformed its political geography, national borders, the laws of science, but also changed
peoples mentality, their individual and social awareness, the ways they learn, work, form and
sever relationships; in short, the way they live.
Yet as others have observed (Papert, 1996) if a Martian returned to the Earth today after an
absence of 500 years, they would find our science labs unrecognisable but would have no trouble
recognising a schoolroom.
It is astonishing how schools have resisted change over the centuries: reforms have been
introduced, of course, access has been extended to the poorer sections of society and to girls,
school buildings have been modernised, new subjects have been introduced, teacher training has
been improved, etc. But educational methods, the pedagogic device (Foucault, 1975;
Mantegazza, 2003), have not changed since the 17th Century, when, largely through the efforts
of religious orders, the modern school was established and pedagogic thought began to develop
as a separate branch of science.
Those who declare that in the last few years many things have changed in schools with the
paradoxical result that schools have not changed. [] Schools do not change, they simply adapt:
adaptation is their survival technique. Adaptation mainly modifies things and the environment;
change profoundly involves people (Graziani, 1994, p. 5) are right. Schools in some countries
only, strictly speaking have witnessed the arrival of new developments such as audiovisual aids
and computers, experimentation with open classes, the introduction of new teaching methods,
reviews of syllabuses and timetables. Yet the fact remains that these adaptations have
occasionally been successful, in some cases they have been failures, and in almost no case have
they brought profound changes in educational practices (ivi, p. 6).
The organisation of space and time, the enforcement of specific rules of physical comportment
and communication codes, and, above all, the model for the educational relationship in schools
have resisted every attempt at reform.
Today, as in the 17th Century, school buildings are still designed for the purpose of
controlling conduct: division into classes meets the criterion of greatest order; corridors are wide
and empty to avoid dangerous crowding and are no more than passageways; windows are very
high, to prevent students from becoming distracted and/or running away (Mantegazza, Seveso
2006, p. 64). Inside the classroom, the desks are designed to correct postures deemed
inappropriate and/or unseemly, and intended for an extremely passive form of teaching, where
the student takes notes, copies, listens, practices handwriting, under the watchful eye of the
schoolmaster, the only hub of the lesson (ivi, 65). The layout of the desks is intended to assist
this watchful eye, and students are allocated places often according to their progress and
behaviour, without being able to change or move; this subdivision also informs relations between
teacher and students and among students, which are based on control and often on telling the
teacher.
3. A brief history of proposed reforms in the educational-teaching relationship
Over the centuries there has been no shortage of thinkers who have attempted to examine the
question of the educational relationship, focusing in some cases on the importance of motivation,
in others on the need for discovery by the student; such classical pedagogic thinkers as Comenius
(1657/1975) or Rousseau (1762) come to mind.
But their indications fell almost entirely on deaf ears: in the 17th and 18th Centuries,
schoolroom practice did not question the idea that, above all, the schoolmaster should keep the
class under control and that the relationship was therefore fundamentally between the teacher
and the class-group, avoiding the many individual variables or even the widespread practice
whereby small children and youngsters of disparate family and at times social provenance are
required to comply with standardised rules that are almost never explained or negotiated by the
teacher (Seveso, 2003, p. 29).

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Go into a state school today (and most private schools) and listen to what the teachers and
governors say: it is unlikely you will find practices and concepts very different to those
mentioned above. The manuals that became popular in the second half of the 17th Century,
advising the teacher of the need to oversee conduct through a carefully structured system of
rewards and punishments will still seem up to date, promoting a veritable microphysics of
power, implemented through minute attention to posture, language, discourse, behaviour, which,
should they stray slightly from the norm, are subject to symbolic or corporal punishment
(Mantegazza, Seveso, 2003, p. 49).
Today, of course, corporal punishment survives only in a handful of schools in remote corners
of the planet, and has virtually disappeared from the developed nations; even so, the principle
of punishment imposed by the adult as a systematic strategy to be employed when predetermined rules are broken or study is inadequate has by no means disappeared; the forms of
psychological violence have simply been refined: humiliations, suspensions, ridicule and other
forms of mistreatment (a primary school teacher in Florence told me it was sometimes necessary
to treat the children badly).
A note by Lorenzo Milani, a schoolmaster in a remote mountain school in Tuscany fifty years
ago, regarding the severity of punishments in the form of reports and, above all, exam failures, is
significant: here in extreme cases we may use the whip. Forget your squeamishness and the
theories of the pedagogics. If you want the whip Ill bring it to you myself, but keep your pen
and register closed. Your pen leaves a mark for a year. The whip mark disappears the next day.
Because of your respectable modern pen [used to sign a failure] Gianni will never read a book in
his life. He will never be able to write a decent letter. A disproportionate and cruel punishment
(Scuola di Barbiana, 1967, pp. 82-83).
During the 20th Century, repeated calls were made for a new approach to educational
relationships and experimentation with innovative teaching methods. Some were inspired by
purely pedagogic considerations: examples include the Montessori schools (Montessori, 1909) or
the new education movement (Ferrire, 1920), which ushered in the great season of pedagogic
activism (Freinet, 1946).
Other interesting studies and proposed reforms in teaching and the educational relationship in
schools emerged in areas more closely related to psychology: the appeal for constant attention to
individual differences at all levels of psychical life in the work of Edouard Claparde
(1931/2003), for instance, or the condemnation of the traditional school, which, according to
Carl Rogers (1967), is incapable of fostering individual autonomy; or the communication
strategies and methods recommended for teachers by Thomas Gordon (1974).
In other cases, the need for new, more open forms of schooling was upheld on the basis of
political considerations: for John Dewey (1916) the ultimate goal of human development is an
education in democracy and the school should therefore combine teaching and socialisation,
reproducing within its walls the difficulties of social life to help students deal with them in a
democratic perspective. Francesco de Bartolomeis (1953) is even more explicit: he condemns the
dogmatic and authoritarian nucleus present in traditional schools, urging teachers to be aware of
their social professionalism and so work to promote a pluralist, self-critical school capable of
contributing to the development of a progressive society.
A utopian and permissive stance is taken in the work of Summerhill (Neill, 1960), whose
school eliminates all traces of fear and any attempt at indoctrination in favour of the free and
spontaneous development of the child, and Paulo Freire (1968): according to the Brazilian
pedagogist, besides teaching basic reading, writing and numeracy skills to the poor, learning
processes should be emancipatory, encouraging students to speak out.
Since the 1960s in the USA and the 1980s in Europe, the practice of Cooperative Learning has
been spreading in schools, whose didactic innovations are based on five principles: positive
interdependence, individual responsibility, face-to-face interaction, teaching and use of social
skills, group assessment (Johnson, 2003). Even so, despite the great success and wide
recognition won by this teaching method, many people in education still express doubt and
perplexity about Cooperative Learning []. This is hardly surprising, given the still widespread
suspicion of group methods in school practice [] (Cacciamani, 2008).

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At a more general level, a certain degree of intransigence can be observed in schools, who feel
threatened by any proposed change, to the point that, after all the theorising and experiments
described above, in the very great majority of cases, and from the second primary-school cycle in
particular, education is still the same in material terms, the concrete nature of the educational
event, the teaching device have not changed.
Schools have resisted the astute criticisms of Michel Foucault (1975), who saw them as
reproducing the control and power structure of prisons; they have resisted the analyses of
Bourdieu (1964; 1970), who censured their symbolic violence; they have also resisted Illichs
invitation (1971) to deschool society in favour of a system promoting an active life, free
learning and conviviality.
In comparisons with other traditionally rigid institutions that, unlike schools, have undergone
important reform, it has been observed that there has not really been an anti-pedagogy force on
a par with the anti-psychiatry cyclone, and the total institutions of education are well shielded
from the upheavals that [in Italy] law 180 brought to hospitals for the mentally ill (Mantegazza,
2008, pp.12 13).
4. Phenomenology of scholastic conservatism
The most serious aspect of this conservative reaction even to the most advanced scientific
proposals and the clearest evidence of ineffectiveness concerns the educational relationship,
which still continues to be structured as a power relationship, between those presumed to
possess knowledge and those applying themselves to acquire that knowledge (Mantegazza,
Seveso, 2006, p. 40).
Obviously, the role of the teacher and the role of the student are probably inevitably
different; what is not inevitable, and indeed urgently needs to change, is that one of the two roles
holds a monopoly of power, and claims the right to impose the content, timing and methods of
learning (subject to then observing its failure, attributed by the teacher to student laziness, absent
families, and so on).
To show just how much this statement is not simply an ideological stance, it may be useful to
consider a number of studies analysing communication in the classroom.
Some of these studies have found an educational culture in schoolrooms, which is
systematically reproduced through interactions guided by the teachers, given that interaction in
the classroom is asymmetrical and depends primarily on the way the teacher projects his
cognitive and normative expectations in communication (Baraldi, 2007, 10). Specifically, the
student is required to comply with the intentions of the teacher, and these intentions stem from
expectation of a change in the student: if the expectation is not met, penalties are imposed and
compliance with and reproduction of educational regulations is demanded. Although every
classroom interaction is specific, it is part of a broader complex educational culture:
consequently, most teachers behave in the same way (following a model that, apart from some
superficial details, has remained virtually unchanged for centuries) and all students, despite the
largely implicit nature of the educational norm, are aware of their duty to take a subordinate
position with respect to their teachers, except that they then plan strategies to evade their
teachers expectations (Panerai, 2011).
At the level of communicative interaction, this asymmetry is apparent in the fact that, in the
classroom, the teacher talks for more than 70% of the time (Ajello, 2004), and when interaction
occurs with the students, it is almost always on the basis of the QAA triplet (Baraldi, Farini,
2010): Question Answer Assessment, with the teacher turning to the student only to check
whether he knows what he should and assess him accordingly (Sinclair-Coulthard, 1975).
Obviously, the student is required to take a hierarchically subordinate role to the educator and
only in very rare cases does he take the initiative: this becomes more pronounced as the student
moves through the school system.
This is certainly nothing new, the problems pinpointed by Marcel Postic (1979) are still highly
relevant today: Postic found that spontaneous student interventions in French secondary schools
accounted for between 2 and 7% of total communication events and were directed solely to the

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teacher; the percentage of teacher interventions was 75%; there was lateral communication
among students, but it was never organised by the teacher within the framework of the traditional
lesson.
Daniele Novara (1997) stresses that, in education, the old model of authoritarianism and
educational humiliations has proved increasingly ineffective and is gradually disappearing (if not
entirely), while alternative ideas and pedagogic experiments are gaining greater ground. Novara
believes there is a pressing need for a new model: schools are reporting problems and difficulties
never previously encountered; but while the inadequacy of the old methods is universally
evident, an alternative educational model has yet to be formulated.
Eleven years on, the problems and difficulties in schools are even more widespread, but there
is no sign of a new educational model; Giuliano Franceschini (2008, pp.25-26) says time may
now be running out, since institutional educational systems are coming to resemble devices that
just spin aimlessly, no longer able to generate subjectivity, internal knowledge and power
relationships, replaced in this role by the anomalous wave of our culture industry and mass
consumption, which will gradually tend to present itself as an educational system in its own
right, complementary to, competing with and an antagonist of the institutional system.
And as the school-Titanic sinks, the orchestra of the traditional educational-didactic
relationship continues to play.
5. The reasons for scholastic conservatism
A number of scholars have attempted to investigate the causes of the persisting resistance to
change in schools (Formisano, 1991; Massa, 1997; Liss, 2000; Smeriglio, 2009).
A series of institutional causes can be identified: the slow pace of change in education
policies, the elephantine dimensions of the state school machine, a centrally planned syllabus to
be followed by all schools, learning assessment through standardised exams, old school buildings
that are unsuitable for innovative didactic models.
Other possible causes are systemic: the economic system might regard innovations in the
educational relationship as potentially dangerous, since they would not teach students
adaptability to future job requirements and growing interest in social matters could lead teaching
of professional skills to be neglected; in short, economic powers tend to encourage a culture of
obedience (Goodman, 1971).
Other causes can be found in daily school life and the relationships inside schools; isolated
attempts at innovation fail in the absence of a support strategy: the criticisms of colleagues and
negative comments its a utopia, your class is always noisy, this isnt a serious teaching
method wound teachers sensitivities and the timid attempt to create a different atmosphere in
the classroom already begins to waver before the benefits can take root. The experimenter
teacher and scapegoat is forced to engage in daily combat with colleagues, taking the role of the
black sheep of the teaching body (Liss, 2000, p. 15).
A source of resistance can also be found in some aspects of cultural tradition, whose strength
is directly proportionate to their age, such as the authority principle: the medieval ipse dixit is
still considered unconsciously at least a valid principle by the great majority of teachers. But
the concept of discipline works in a system where the authority principle is very clearly defined,
embraced and mutually confirmed by all the adults with educational responsibilities, beginning
with parents. Since 1968, the crisis of the hierarchical principle has been plain for all to see. []
teachers who, simply for historical reasons, cannot refer to an authority principle that no longer
exists and so can no longer use a concept of discipline in the same way as their teachers used it
with them, have to develop other strategies based on new ways of reading situations (Novara,
2007, p. 41).
The concerns and requirements of parents who are unwilling to risk their childrens education
with new and unproven teaching methods could be yet another obstacle to change in schools.
Some scholars (Foti et al., 2003) point to the existence of other mistaken beliefs that persist
despite the evidence provided by research: for example, the concepts that tend to denigrate
emotions and their expression as an irremediable loss of communication and rational

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effectiveness; this occurs within a cultural and institutional approach that applauds maximum
efficiency and performance (and therefore considers attention to the educational relationship to
be a waste of time).
Conservatism also has deep-lying causes: if there is an institution that is more successful than
others at resisting change, that institution is the school, together with educational practices of any
type [] because they activate the deepest and most recondite determinants of the significance
of thought and experience (Massa, 1997, p. 9). To change schools, therefore, Massa believes an
exercise in thought is necessary, before any political or institutional discourse. Schools have to
be re-created and re-generated, not just renewed. [] but in thinking about our experience of the
modern school where the term experience indicates a web of interpretative models, objective
data and personal experience so far no rupture has occurred (ivi, p. 10).
The impression is that today a real rupture has taken place in society, a break with previous
models of behaviour and thought: I refer to the anthropological turmoil engendered by the spread
of the internet and, in particular, by the advent of Web 2.0.
6. Digital natives versus immigrant teachers
Over the last fifteen years a probably decisive element has erupted forcefully into the
educational community, attempting to shake it out of its immobilism: the generation of digital
natives (Prensky, 2001).
This apposite definition refers to people born during the 1990s who, unlike the previous
generations, have been surrounded by technological objects since infancy: at home, in school,
with their friends, they are always accompanied by digital prostheses which help shape their
methods of communication, their self-expression and ultimately their identity. By using
screens, icons, and sounds, virtual browsing and ICT to communicate, the generation of digital
natives has developed methods of learning and expression radically different to those in use
before 1996 (the year when the internet, in the West at least, started to become a mass
phenomenon).
Todays adults are digital immigrants, still tied to an alphabetic culture rooted in the
authority of the book and a linear learning style, whereas digital natives use multiple codes and
media and a multitasking learning style; and while the digital immigrants approach to
knowledge is largely rooted in a one many communication style, where learning occurs
through absorption and subsequent internalisation, what is important to the digital native is to
create and share knowledge, learning through exploration, attempts and games, always aiming to
externalise information: in short, if todays adults regard reading as the key to serious
knowledge, what counts for youngsters is to connect and surf.
Clearly, then, what we are seeing today is an epoch-making change; it may not be an
exaggeration to say that since the internet and computer networks have become a mass
phenomenon, we [digital] immigrants have been witness to a singular phenomenon, of a kind
previously experienced only five hundred years ago by the scholars who lived through the
revolution of the printing press (Ferri, 2011, p. 53).
The key factor behind the generational rupture is the advent of Web 2.0 (OReilly, 2005); in
other words, the spread of applications enabling users to create and share online content. Thanks
to blogs, wiki applications, YouTube, the various social networks, sites with reviews by
members of the public, the internet user is no longer just a user but an author, and the web has
acquired a social dimension grounded in the concepts of sharing and participation.
What has been described as a participatory culture is spreading among the very young 2,
characterised by a tendency to personal expression (at an artistic level, but also at a political
level), by strong support for content production and sharing, by a sense of belonging to the
2

A study published a few years ago found that more than 50% of adolescents in the USA had created media content
and around one third had shared the content they produced (Lenhart Madden 2005); in Italy, it has been
established that about 85% of adolescents use the internet, compared, for example, with around 45% of forty-year
olds (ISTAT, 2009)

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community, by the elimination of the traditional barriers of citizenship or hierarchy. Schools

have yet to equip themselves to respond to this revolution: teachers find it very hard to adapt
their teaching methods to the new cognitive styles of Web 2.0 natives. A survey in the UK
conducted by an international research body (Ipsos MORI, 2007) found that digital natives are
no longer willing simply to listen to the teacher, take notes and copy from the blackboard; they
want to study in groups and with their peers, learn through experience, co-produce internet
content: in other words, they want a more active, personalised and social way of learning.
In an attempt to keep up, some enlightened teachers, with the support of IT experts, have
begun talking about education 2.0, school 2.0, but only in terms of education through the
new technological tools; they fail to grasp the philosophical and anthropological implications of
the revolution taking place, and in many cases subvert the significance of 2.0. Some pioneering
education 2.0 projects have in fact resulted in a form of education that is the opposite of the
participatory, collective and productive educational dimension sought by the digital generation:
distance learning.
Here, I want to examine Education 2.0 not in the sense of educational processes implemented
through the web. Research will probably lead to the creation of situations where the internet can
be used in school environments with more effective outcomes than today, and important trials
have already been conducted with successful teaching programs (Mayer, 2001; Calvani, 2007;
Ferri, 2008); the aim here, however, is to look at the application in formal education contexts of
the key Web 2.0 principles, which seem to be enjoying so much success among the new
generations:
participation;
personalisation (and at the same time self-expression);
working as a group and forming communities (and at the same time peer-to-peer
communication);
creativity (i.e., the possibility to create new content, new skills);
learning through experience (in a non-linear, non-dogmatic fashion).
7. Facilitated maieutic dialogue: a resource for school 2.0
It should be clear from the above that the need for change is urgent if schools are to achieve
their educational objectives.
Yet we cannot ignore the fact that the current situation, in which almost all countries (Italy in
particular) are cutting education spending, is an added complication: both from an economic
viewpoint (education 2.0 would require greater numbers of educators, who would have to be
properly trained), and from a psychological viewpoint (teachers are frustrated by their low levels
of economic and social consideration, and therefore disinclined to take on new commitments).
Hopefully, the new digital generation coming up now will press for greater investment and
greater equity in policy decisions, by lobbying for the forms of participation and creationtransformation they embody.
We should be clear that the ability to create new skills and realities, constructive cooperation
among peers, positive self-expression, are elements present in the digital generation only in
potentiality3, to put it in Aristotelian terms: if they are to mature, if they are to become actuality
in schools, and, tomorrow, in society (and not be relegated to a virtual dimension), an
appropriate approach is needed among adults with an educational role.
According to Jenkins (2009), pedagogic intervention in this area is necessary for three reasons,
namely, the problem of transparency (and recognition of the ways the media shape perceptions
of the world), the disintegration of traditional forms of socialisation and related ethics, the
participation gap. Tackling this third point, however, is not so much a question of resolving the
problem of technological access, as of promoting opportunities for participation and fostering the
3

Indeed, a number of studies have underlined the risks of the digitalisation of an entire generation, e.g., Castells
(2001) on the sociological front, and Giorgetti Fumel (2010) from a psychoanalytical perspective. Another very
interesting critical contribution comes from Morozov (2011), at an ethical and political level.

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development of cultural skills and social abilities to assist full engagement with the new
participatory culture.
This is the goal of the proposal for facilitated maieutic dialogue.
FMD can be understood and used within a constructivist-social approach to knowledge, by
which I mean that composite set of theories, research and experiments with a common
inspiration based largely on Vygotskyian psychology (Vygotskij, 1978), which consider the
learning process not as absorption of information from a presumed external reality, but as
knowledge building. The foundation for knowledge building is social cooperation and sharing
processes, which take place in meaningful, genuine contexts (or environments), where
exploratory activities are conducted, beginning with problems taken from real life (Jonassen,
2000).
Over the years, a number of different application models have been developed within this
theoretical context: Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998), where the sense of belonging to a
community and sharing its practices is fundamental for learning4; Legitimate Peripheral
Participation (Lave, Wenger, 1991), where every member of the learning group, even the least
expert, enjoys equal rights of membership from the moment of entry, and full entitlement to the
groups practices, discourse and resources; Communities of Learners (Brown, Campione, 1994),
with a strong dialogic basis where a strategic role is played by metacognitive processes and the
contextualised, situated dimension of learning; Fostering Communities of Learners (Brown,
Campione, 1994), which emphasise peer tutoring and information sharing.
Clearly, these didactic proposals, with their insistence on the core importance of
communication, sharing, free expression, are more closely attuned to the new way of learning of
the new digital generations outlined in the previous section.
The Rome University work group (Pontecorvo, Ajello, Zucchermaglio 2007; Fasulo,
Pontecorvo, 1999) has helped clarify the role of peer-to-peer dialogue in knowledge building.
Drawing also on sociolinguistics (Wardhaugh, 2006) and on discourse analysis models
(Sinclair, Coulthard, 1975), in a number of field surveys the Italian researchers found that
reasoning on a particular subject is often developed through contributions from multiple
interlocutors: a form of thinking together takes place which does not correspond exactly to the
thinking of one particular interlocutor and has not yet been developed by anyone (Pontecorvo,
2007, p. 77). In other words, the social context appears to facilitate thought on a socio-emotional
level: each individual can use what the others say and the effort or emotional weight of thinking
is subdivided by sharing thought; each individual may think and say even just one piece of the
discourse, which can be used to build another piece and then returned to him or her in what other
people say in a more elaborate formula (Pontecorvo, 2007, 82).
Using the Conversation Analysis method (Hutchby, Wooffitt, 2008), Claudio Baraldi (2007)
and his research team at Modena University attempted to identify among other things the
linguistic acts most conducive to participation in dialogic interaction and the role the adult can
take especially in a school environment to promote that interaction.
If psycho-pedagogic research has developed convincing analyses and proposals for the most
effective strategies and techniques to assist learning in a dialogic context, most of the merit for
perceiving the great ethical and transformational significance of peer-to-peer dialogue 5 also in a
political sense belongs to sociologist and activist Danilo Dolci6.
Apel and Habermas (1983) also see dialogue as the universal foundation of ethics: dialogue is
only possible if we recognise the other party as a person, a subject with the same rights as
ourselves, with whom an agreement must be established based on reciprocal respect for our
needs; we have to examine life decisions through this dialogic procedure among peers to be able
to express an opinion on what is less wrong (Sen, 2009).
4

Priority is given to the dialogic dimension of the learning process, so that the individual benefits from being a
member of a community that builds knowledge
5
In this case, the term peer indicates not only a person of the same age, but also the absence of hierarchical
disparities, with all participants having the same value and the same rights
6
To learn more about Dolcis life and work, see McNeish (1965) and Dolci (2008)

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Danilo Dolci applied this philosophical approach at meetings of peasant farmers in the very
poor Sicilian community in which he chose to live and for which he fought battles for justice and
lawfulness. Between the 1950s and 1970s he was so convinced of the transformational power of
correctly structured dialogue that he devoted the last twenty years of his life almost exclusively
to examining the question of communication and promoting what he called the reciprocal
maieutic approach (1996).
The inspiration for Dolcis work to combat poverty and the mafia in the province of Palermo
was not a dependency culture, but self-generating community. He offered local residents an
opportunity to grow, to learn to recognise their deepest needs, to understand exactly what
resources they could enhance.
The term maieutic immediately brings to mind Socrates art of the midwife, but, as has
been noted, Dolci is not the Socrates who waits for his disciples to realise a concept, but a
researcher who advances with his companions, growing with them, educating himself with them
(Galeazzi, 1992, p. 246). Like Socratic maieutics7, Dolcis approach is based on a fundamental
humanism: an explicit recognition of the value of the interior laboratory of human subjectivity.
However, Dolci differs from Socrates on a number of points.
First of all, Dolci is not addressing minorities, the top layers of organised society, but the base,
and always begins with those at the bottom, whereas Socrates always addresses people of a
certain social class. Additionally, while the goal of Platos master is to help the individual realise
an existing truth through careful questions, for Dolci the goal is to highlight the essential
function of the dialogue itself; the individual does not take a passive role with respect to a
midwife who helps him pull out knowledge, it is through their relationship (a reciprocal
maieutic relationship) that knowledge is creatively generated: the interior laboratory present in
every individual processes the material sourced through his dialogic relationship with the group.
A final point, whereas the Socratic-Platonic dialogue set out to investigate reality in order to
discover immutable truths (in the classical age, with rare exceptions the conception of the
universe was static), Dolcis approach is eminently creative: it starts from an analysis of reality
to develop a project for change: Dolci realised that interpersonal meetings, frank and open
exchanges, mutual questioning can, in a fully symmetrical situation, facilitate unexpected
personal growth paths and creative, innovative ideas for transforming reality (Panerai, 2012).
Not in a rigid manner, the conversation develops more or less as follows: one by one, each
participant at the meeting expresses their view of the issue. Usually, care is taken to ensure that
those who might inhibit the others, due to greater education, prestige and so on, are the last to
speak, so that everyone can have a say [] For now I moderate the meetings, encouraging the
participants to express themselves and at the end summarising the common points that emerged
during the discussion (Dolci, 2008, pp. 74-75). Dolci offers few other practical pointers on
what, correctly speaking, cannot even be called a maieutic method; he tends to refer to a
maieutic structure (Dolci, 1996): His pedagogic thought is not concerned with an exact,
precise, scientific method for learning, it considers and works on the circumstances under which
learning takes place. [] Dolcis main interest lies in the pre-conditions for creative learning. He
is much less interested in how learning actually occurs, because, in a certain sense, the problem
of achieving knowledge was something to be assigned to a personal and group research project,
in other words to a maieutic project (Novara, 2011, p. 13).
This approach certainly has the advantage of underlining the importance, for the group leader,
of developing a strong aptitude for trusting people and respecting everyone. But given the
situation in schools described above, the urgent need for change and the difficult psychological
and social situation of teachers today, I believe that we also need a series of strategically
organised tools and techniques to help teachers in the difficult task of coordinating groups in
situations of participative dialogue for learning and knowledge building.
In other words, teachers need to become group facilitators.
Facilitation is a non-directive form of group management, whose purpose is to optimise the
resources present in the group and maximise participation; by a facilitated work group we mean
7

Socratic maieutics is presented through the metaphor of the midwife in Platos Theaetetus

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a small collection of people who share a goal and perform various tasks, with the help of a
facilitator to accomplish their objectives (Philips, Philips, 1993, p. 533). The facilitator has to
maintain a dual focus: effective achievement of the objective and the socio-emotional well-being
of the group members.
Having been deployed, albeit in a limited manner, in corporate environments, participatory
process facilitation and its potential have attracted growing interest among local government
bodies, who have promoted popular consultation processes on local governance, especially in the
area of town-planning (Tidore, 2009). The point I want to stress here is the enormous
transformative impact that development of maieutic facilitation skills could have in schools.
Early pioneering researchers (Rardin, 1977) emphasised that the learning group facilitator
should not simply sit the students in a circle and reformulate what they say, but should acquire
appropriate communication skills. Other authors attempted to establish what these skills are
(Liss, 1992; De Sario, 2006) as confirmation grew of the effectiveness of facilitation in schools
and in learning groups in general (Czerwinsky Domenis, 2000; Chi-Wai Kwok, Jian Ma,
Douglas R. Vogel, 2003; Cappello, 2011; De Sario, 2011).
I have endeavoured elsewhere to summarise the specific skills required by a group facilitator
(Baukloh, Panerai, 2010, Panerai, 2011); here, I will simply provide a list of possible valuable
practices8 for teachers who want to stimulate Facilitated Maieutic Dialogue in their classes:
Clarify the problem to be examined and the goal to achieve;
Provide brief summaries illustrating the point reached by the discussion;
Use a board to show key words that emerge, suggestions, important points, results
achieved;
Stimulate attention and motivation;
Move each issue from negativity (criticism) to positivity (proposal);
Examine each proposal from the abstract to the concrete;
Display verbal and non-verbal behaviour that is respectful and encourages trust;
Keep your interventions short and invite the group members to be brief;
Use the first person (I, me) and invite the group members to do the same;
Distinguish interpretations from observations and encourage the group to do the same.
Obviously, the authority principle should not be entirely abandoned. Rather, the teachers
authority should be enhanced and better directed; in the approach proposed here, the teacher
uses his authority not to give lessons and then conduct exams, but to arouse interest among the
students and organise methods that regulate student-teacher interaction and enhance student-tostudent cooperation.
8. Conclusions
I have shown that the traditional method of establishing the educational relationship in schools
is no longer viable, especially in the wake of the arrival of a generation of youngsters born and
bred in the Web 2.0 age.
Careful consideration of the results of constructivist psycho-pedagogic research, coupled with
a revival of the reciprocal maieutic approach first advocated by Danilo Dolci, can lead teachers
to rethink their relationship with students and adopt the approach of the maieutic facilitator,
organising in their classes opportunities for dialogue that respond in full to the demand expressed
by the generation of digital natives for participation, creation, expression and sharing in
schools.

It should be noted that each of these actions requires specific preparation, through reference to the manuals in the
bibliography and, above all, through participation in specific training sessions

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82

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