Tessere l’educazione nei percorsi formativi attraverso le testimonianze dei genitori

Training courses for educators and pedagogues generally devote a great deal of attention to families, parental experiences in relation to educational and school practices and services, social policies, and the fragilities and resources of mothers and fathers. Students learn from studies and research about family morphologies, the skills and difficulties of parents faced with educational responsibilities. Rarely, however, do they have the opportunity to deal directly with family caregivers, to listen to their stories, the hardships and satisfactions they encounter in raising children. Parents probably also silently cultivate beliefs, impressions and representations of educational and school services, cherish unexpressed expectations and thoughts towards educators, pedagogues and teachers.  But how would their respective, reciprocal representations change if direct confrontations were to take place already in the training courses, i.e. if one could ask questions and share reflections with the other? What wishes, encouragements, suggestions could parents offer future education professionals? In order to try to answer these questions, an open lesson was arranged for students of the three-year degree course in Education Sciences and the Master's degree course in Pedagogical Design in Services for Children at the Catholic University of Piacenza, to which some representatives of a Piacenza parents' association were invited. This article intends to give an account of this confrontation experience and the results it achieved in terms of dialogue and training, in order to assess the opportunity to contemplate more opportunities for discussion between parents and students as a systematic proposal of the university training offer.