The “Table for Education”: learning from community life experiences

The paper aims to propose the learning potential of dialogue as well as of breakdown and conflict in a special context (the “Table for education”) and using a particular tool: the MAG (Méthode d’analyse en groupe). The complexity of community contexts implies the presence of diversity and requires to implement not only a plurality of levels of action, but also a plurality of interpretations. In this sense, MAG represents a useful methodological device that allows to face the analysis of phenomena that characterize the life of a community, while promoting in people involved capability to engage with diversity and otherness. In groups, or in general in the relational contexts that involve more than one subject, the representations of the phenomena are divergent, as well as the needs and resources that each one brings. Assuming that this heterogeneity is unavoidable, we propose a possible way through which it could be managed and also promote learning. This perspective of a relational, plural and conflictual construction of social phenomena and their hermeneutics refers to a theoretical framework that allows to assume conflict as precondition for a cooperation that is intrinsically conflictual but, precisely for this, enabling awareness of a real togetherness.