The “Departments of Excellence” represent an innovative intervention, provided by the Italian Ministry of Universities, with the aim of identifying, every 5 years, the best 180 Italian Departments, which stand out for the quality of their academic research and the quality of their development project. The “Department of Education and Humanities” (DESU) of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia is one of the winners of the title of excellence, for the period 2023-2027, with the project “High social cost illiteracies: research tools for their reduction”.
DESU was awarded mainly for three aspects: the international impact of its research; the interdisciplinary nature of its research interests; and the intensity of its collaborative relations for the qualitative improvement of educational services.
The scientific project for the development of DESU hinges on a problem on which research can offer cognitive and operational answers. Despite the liberal character of Western societies, the widespread availability of goods and access to information in the digital space, we are witnessing the emergence of illiteracies that prevent many people from actively participating in civil society, thus fostering inequality and weakening democratic debate and social cohesion.
The aim of the project is to make DESU an interdisciplinary hub of national and international relevance in the study of illiteracy at high social cost and in the identification of educational intervention modalities for contrasting it, also through the development of key competencies, in formal and nonformal educational settings. This aim responds both to new frontiers of scientific research and to social and educational emergencies.
Among the proposals of DESU’s Project of Excellence is the creation of a Laboratory on Critical Thinking, with a philosophical perspective, although in permanent dialogue with the other disciplines of the Project of Excellence (particularly pedagogy, history, literature). By “critical thinking” is meant here not so much the applied forms of philosophical thinking with a view to functionalist solutions to organizational problems (design thinking, etc., i.e., in the form of problem solving), but rather the set of meta-reflexive features of philosophical thinking, capable of constructing a complex analysis of the illiteracy-competence nexus in the contemporary world.
Having as a background the problems of the complex links between new illiteracies and skills development, this Laboratory aims to promote theoretical analyses, philosophical-political reflections and experimental educational actions for the development of argumentative and interpretive skills (regarding texts, images and contexts), so as to emphasize the importance of a democratic space that is not polarized but, on the contrary, constituted by an informed public opinion.
In fact, in recent decades, in Western societies, major transformations of the public sphere have taken place resulting from multiple factors: among them, the weakening of political participation (the shift from party democracy to social media democracy), the advent of digital media, and the loss of authority of traditional social and educational agencies (schools, parties, churches, etc.) in favor of new modes of communication, consisting mainly of digital images that, however, are often not understood or interpreted correctly. As a consequence, the public debate today is increasingly resembling a “collage” in which official voices, personal opinions, militant claims, fake news, scientific theories, claims of radical groups converge in an uncontrolled manner. We thus see the emergence of new forms of cultural illiteracy that undermine the quality of public opinion and, consequently, the democracy (which can be said to be so only in the presence of informed citizens, capable of understanding cultural diversity and open to rational and reasoned discussion).
Unlike in the past, present-day illiteracies do not consist only of a lack of knowledge caused by social and educational poverty (scarcity of economic resources, domination of the principle of authority, etc.) because the widespread availability of goods, the existence of democratic structures and access to the Internet consent – at least in principle – large possibilities of knowledge and critical awareness. Despite all this, in our “societies of abundance”, the illiteracies concerning key basic skills proliferate. This situation certainly depends on structural factors (related to the circular dynamics of production-consumption that determine new forms of social and political consensus) but also on individual factors (poor exercise of critical skills, etc.) on which the Laboratory intends to offer elements for analysis, reflections and actions.
To overcome illiteracies and recover a virtuous dimension of democratic societies, therefore, it is necessary to recover forms of critical thinking, which go through the education of individual capacities for rational argumentation, listening to the reasons and affections of the “other”, complex understanding of verbal and visual images, and the interpretation of texts and contexts in synchronic and diachronic terms.