ECER 2021. Paolo Bonafede PhD, University of Trento, Italy

1. Paolo Bonafede, PhD.
7 September 2021
Reading and memory shreds:
learning during (and beyond)
pandemic
ECER 2021, GENEVA
EERA NETWORK: 13 (Philosophy of Education)

2. Pandemic as point of departure
During this last year virus Sars-Cov2 has
acted as an ambivalent environmental factor.
Acceleration and Alienation
1. Lockdown strategy (MACRO)
2. Smartworking funanbolism (MICRO)
2
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

3. DaD (distance learning), DDI (integrated digital teaching), etc.
The frantic research for an adequate technological
adaptation of the didactic o
ff
er, which involved
teachers, students and families, has produced
wavering results
Recent studies shows that distance learning
increases the potential learning gap between
students (World Bank of Education, 2020).
Digital divide is a social-learning divide, and this
represents an obstacle for education.
More generally, school represents the tip of the
Iceberg in a complex learning change related to
human interactions with ICT (Buckingham, 2019).
School, technologies and distance
School and formal education
Complex learning changes
3
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

4. The ineluctability of digital technologies in our lives delivers the
dialogical need to rethink from an educational stand point the
technical-media dimension that intercepts and modifies the horizon
of education for all human beings. This contribution aims to verify the
relationships existing between human beings and ICT, with special
reference to how these interactions involve learning processes.
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

5. • Rosy Braidotti: the technologically mediated world turns
out to be hybrid, o
ff
ering theoretical, political and social
opportunities that unmask the logics of exclusion
connected to the traditional vision of man (Humanism as
Anthropocentrism in Modernity) leaving room for gender,
environmental and postcolonial studies that denounce
the humiliation of otherness in centuries.
• Braidotti suggest an a
ffi
rmative posthumanism
approach, who takes the opportunity to rede
fi
ne the
concepts of man, death, life, species, individual (with
evident re
fl
ections on ethics and politics), in an
anthropodecentered perspective.
• The living is the synthesis of a nomadic becoming that
mixes organic and inorganic, overcoming the dichotomy
culture vs nature that marked modern humanism and
arriving at the idea of a relational, hybrid subject: a
"becoming-earth", "becoming-animal", “becoming-
machine”.
In this perspective education is hybridization, walking
through connections.
Theoretical assumptions on
Human-Computer Interactions
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

6. • Luciano Floridi: we are informational
organisms (inforg) immersed in an
environment that combines pre-digital
reality and binary logic.
• In this sense philosophical-educational
re
fl
ection can make its own a conciliatory
and integrated approach between bits and
anthropos which keeps
fi
rmly the essential
references to the speci
fi
c (also if nomadic)
structures of both agents.
• Assuming this interpretation of
contemporary culture, the central issue
becomes the interface, or the observation
lens with which the human being relates to
digital language - both in terms of simple
user and even more in terms of design.
Theoretical assumptions on
Human-Computer Interactions
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

7. • Bernard Stiegler: Although he is certainly not "humanist"
in the most traditional sense, Stiegler defends a sort of
"deconstructed humanism" in which people, and
especially young people, are able to identify themselves
as "non-inhuman" beings.
• Stiegler uses the concept of individuation, with which he
understands the double process of self-de
fi
nition as:
• a di
ff
erence related to otherness through which a
person reaches an individual sense separate from the
identities of others and begins to consciously exist as
a human being in the world
• a process of awareness and formation of this identity
in relation to technological di
ff
erence, according to
Freire's logic.
• To take care of the human possibility of structuring as
individuals it is not enough to modernize learning tools (or
refuse them). It is about seeing how they produce new
types of individual psychic and socio-collective structures.
Theoretical assumptions on
Human-Computer Interactions
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

8. This means that, in my perspective:
- in the first place education must be considered - using an expression of Eugen Fink - as that original
phenomenon of human life (Fink, 1957) which is relational and intergenerational: it concerns the existing
generation that welcomes and introduces newcomers into a world already existing where the prevalent
technologies are included. Technologies are in effect a further window on the world, because they mediate
our relationship with reality and allow us to incorporate cognitive and social patterns and habits.
- secondly, education is not only the transmission and assumption of the gaze of others (technological or
human) on the world, but allows newcomers to relate freely, distancing themselves and creating new
creative forms of openness to the world.
Thus, adopting an integrated approach between human beings and technologies - such as the one
advocated by Stiegler (and Vlieghe) - we do not fall into a technodeterminist perspective, and we do not
necessarily lead education to forms of radical trans-humanism.
Although we are formed by technologies, we are not fully defined by them. Being educated (as opposed to
simply being inserted into a world, or indoctrinated) means having the opportunity to move forward with
what really matters, even in unpredictable and truly innovative ways, in an ever-coextensive circle of
excavation of foundations and exploration of new paths (Vlieghe, 2018).
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

9. Fragmentation
History is fragmented because collective and individual
memories are fragmented (Baron, 2014). It happens for two
reasons: the exorbitant amount of data (Ulin, 2010) and their
volatility, and the new habits of reading.
Digital devices combine a hasty way of approaching
reading, often carried out in contexts that are not adequate
to activate processes of deep reading and meaningful
learning (Rivoltella, 2020).
The average person consumes data in rhapsodic and
fragmented sequences of activities, losing the habit of
continuous reading, prolonged and concentrated (Wolf,
2018).
Hyper-history
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

10. Bi-alfabetization
• Wolf proposes a reform project of
learning where reading and media
literacy are maintained as parallel
and integrated skills. In this way
the culture of the book and the ICT
culture could be integrated: a
sequential, alphabetic, narrative
culture, capable of organizing and
structuring thought, should be
combinate with topological, spatial
culture, where intuitively exploits
the analogies, the comparisons
between images and interactivity.
Wolf proposal
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

11. The integration of topological and
alphabetic approach gives rise to
hybridization in the learning
processes, safeguarding alphabetic
education that leads to an analytic-
narrative thought and integrating it
with a sensorial education that
activates spatial logics, favors the
intuitive thinking and activates
sharing and co-construction
processes (Kahneman, 2011).
Topological and
alphabetic Learning
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

12. … is a brain capable of allocating time and
attention to deep reading skills regardless
of the medium used, while maintaining the
abilities o
ff
ered by habits of digital life
(Wolf, 2018).
Thus, the opportunities that teaching
activities can draw from a stable
relationship between students, teachers
and technologies in hybrid, plural forms of
learning, capable of combining formal and
informal (Potter, McDougall, 2017), are
enhanced, passing from an (emergency)
distance teaching to digitally augmented
didactics.
A bi-literate brain for
the new generations…
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

13. This method - which in its theoretical speci
fi
city is based on integration - can be
historically found in forms of cultural transmission and learning that have been
separated.
The topological approach, centered on gaze, sight and adaptive responses to images, is
certainly what characterizes digital education today, but in the history of culture it has
accompanied elementary and popular forms of learning. I refer to the role played by
sacred art, to the representations of the lives of the saints as ethical models of civil and
social virtue, from which those who could not have access to literacy learned in an
intuitive and immediate way the di
ff
erent forms of Christian Caritas (Bargellini, 1968, p.
74; Barbero, Frugoni, 1999).
Alphabetical learning (thought up to late modernity for the elite) has been interpreted
over the centuries according to the formulas of the ars legendi, the rigorously extensive
erudite reading, which required time functional to the ars excerpendi, the practice of
drafting notebooks of extracts used to compose new texts according to a circular and
re
fl
ective process. An art shared in modernity by many European scholars, such as
Montesquieu, J.J. Winckelmann, J.G. Hamann, G.C. Lichtenberg, J.G. Herder, J.J.W.
Heinse, L.-S. Mercier, G.W.F. Hegel, A. Rosmini or G. Leopardi. In this way the processes
of interpretation, re
fl
ection and written re-elaboration were combined in a study method
that allowed to remember more and in a much more orderly way, freeing scholars from
the obsession with mnemonic learning and relying on secondary memory.
Wolf's proposal would only integrate historically consolidated forms of education and
learning, adding digital interactivity.
Unite past methods
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

14. In concusion, building a bi-literate brain:
- brings back the goal of learning to learn (Delors, 1996; Recommendations 2006/962/CE;
Recommendations 2018/C 189/01 ) - beyond specific literacy (reading and media) - within a
meta-reflective horizon, in which the importance of learning does not reside exclusively in
skills or activities, but in the allocation of time to investigate one's own cognitive processes
(Novak, 1996).
- In this perspective school would acquire the role of meta-reflective guide, offering support
to students in the construction of an increasingly conscious and personalized study method,
in which to rediscover the centrality of reading and memory in the learning processes.
Thank you
Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021

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Paolo Bonafede, PhD. University of Trento, Italy 7 September 2021