Conseguenze non previste e apprendimento professionale: insegnanti riflessivi tra ambiguità e lavoro cognitivo

[Autom. eng. transl.] Within educational institutions it is increasingly common to experience situations of conflict in interactions and to meet unexpected developments that challenge the actor's rationality and translate into innovative professional learning. The aim of the essay is to examine such learning, which matures in professional situations characterized by ambiguity, contradiction, ambivalence, etc., to reason about the figure of the teacher as a reflective professional. The underlying assumption is that teachers, like other practitioners of knowledge, are reflective professionals who can only use their cognitive resources and experience in a creative way under certain conditions. It starts from the description of some exemplary cases of teachers who face unexpected situations; these are the learning mechanisms underlying these unexpected situations (par. II) and the concept of sociological ambivalence drawn from RK Merton (par. III), to then verify through the application of an interpretative model to the case of the teacher (par. IV ) the oscillatory strategies used to deal with ambivalence between opposite values (tradition / innovation; repetition / variability, etc.).