Teaching as an educational and formative experience
Maria Grazia Riva
Teaching is enriched when viewed from a three-dimensional perspective, beyond the so-called «learnification» paradigm (Biesta, 2023): it takes the form of an educational, formative, participatory, and democratic experience that is engaging and holistic (Baldacci, 2025). Teaching can be approached from various disciplinary and sub-disciplinary perspectives, in a more technical and specialized manner — for example, in relation to methods, techniques, and tools — or by drawing on the contingent experiences of learners, or else by questioning the underlying pedagogical frameworks. In this vein, this paper proposes interpreting teaching as a holistic educational and formative experience (hooks, 2020), in which subjective dimensions, contexts, learning histories, and the pedagogical-didactic framework within which this experience takes shape are central (Massa, 1999; Ferrante, 2017). Teaching is thus conceived as a complex and nonlinear field, within which students and teachers are fully engaged in a human — and even «beyond human» (Ferrante, 2018) — formative and social process. Each individual learns by «internalizing» what the environment offers, along complex life trajectories that span formal, non-formal, and informal contexts, in line with a perspective of lifelong, lifewide, and lifedeep education. Teachers, too, bring their own learning histories, which shape their practices, pedagogical choices, the design of instructional frameworks, and the nature of their educational relationships. However, it is precisely in the concrete reality of the teaching experience that the limitations of a conception of knowledge — built on the divisions and oversimplifications typical of modern pedagogy — become apparent. In this sense, teaching — precisely because it is a concrete, practical experience that puts practices into action — can be seen as a point of rupture where tensions, excesses, and dimensions of experience — affective, relational, and symbolic — become visible; these elements elude full formalization and have often been marginalized or rendered invisible. Interpreting teaching as a holistic and nonlinear educational experience thus allows us to move beyond a juxtapositional view of its elements (teacher, student, method, assessment), opening up the possibility of examining what takes place in the «interstitial spaces» — which are often not immediately addressed but are crucial to learning processes. From this perspective, we can also embrace a different conception of teacher education (Michelini, 2022), which requires a high degree of reflexivity (Mezirow, 2003; Schön, 1993; Biesta, 2022), the ability to confront one’s own lack of knowledge, and a willingness to reexamine practices, mechanisms, and frameworks of meaning, while acknowledging the complexity of educational judgment and the unpredictability of the educational experience.
Keywords
Teaching, pedagogy, rupture, excess, opacity.
