Accompagnare le comunità locali: prospettive pedagogiche dopo la pandemia

[Autom. eng. transl.] During the pandemic, faced with the emergence and intensification of needs especially among the most vulnerable people and families, multiple responses arose from below, from local communities. Now that the most critical period (from a strictly health point of view) is over, however, the socio-economic consequences and impacts on individual and collective well-being remain. The activation and participation from below, the resources that communities have been able to deploy in terms of solidarity and mutualism, can still be precious today, as well as necessary, to accompany the post-pandemic dynamics. However, the risk is that the solutions and actions created during the emergency struggle to remain alive in the long term. On the one hand, these experiences must address the critical issue of guaranteeing continuity and constant availability of resources, so as not to be configured as temporary initiatives. On the other hand, the desired "return to normality" could lead to losing the awareness gained through these community experiences, re-proposing the dynamics of before: it then becomes important to accompany these collective processes, so that they can generate transformative learning and transform themselves, redefining themselves constantly in a context that is itself changed and continually changing. It is then possible to imagine the post-pandemic period as a time of subsidiarity and shared responsibility and care. From a pedagogical perspective, a significant role could be assumed in this sense by educational figures: acting at a "meso" level (with reference to the systemic and ecological paradigm), education professionals could act as facilitators and companions of such community processes, developing shared trajectories and intentionalities. In this perspective, initiatives born spontaneously by communities can be recognized in their specificity, giving voice to the requests that move them and the people who animate them, reaffirming the need and value of different, but not fragmented, methods of intervention. Finally, the pedagogical gaze could accompany a reflective rereading of these same experiences, bringing out and generating transformative learning through dialogue and comparison, within a perspective of personal and community empowerment. In this sense, the educational action would be configured as aimed at supporting processes of agency in the territories, starting from giving a first-person say to those who live and animate them: for, but above all with, those who live in conditions of marginality and vulnerability. This contribution starts from the research "Restarting from the community: experiences of solidarity and social cohesion in the time of Covid-19", which explored four experiences of mutualism and solidarity active in the city of Brescia, a context strongly affected by the pandemic from the early stages .