Cultivating the ethics of reciprocity to educate for democracy: a comparative exploration of the legacy of Jane Addams and Danilo Dolci

Cultivating the ethics of reciprocity to educate for democracy: a comparative exploration of the legacy of Jane Addams and Danilo Dolci • Jane Addams understood the social relations as essentially reciprocal and focused on the capacity of each and every individual to enter in a “give and take” process which goes beyond a simple transactional exchange since it frames a deeper, relational exchange based on shared social life and ethics. • The dynamic and responsive interplay between individuals from different cultural and social backgrounds, can be descibed as “dialogic reciprocity” referring to the empathetic and active effort to understand others' perspectives and to engage into a a responsive and interactive relationship across differences. The construction and development of this kind of relationship implies the possibility to mobilize what Addams describes as “sympathetic knowledge”, the capacity to learn about one another through intimate association and active listening, moving beyond individualistic viewpoints and a overcoming the reference to a propositional form of knowledge in order to engage in a transformative form of learning and understanding of the world. • Reciprocity frames moral agency as an interactive, not individualistic mode of acting and requires to cultivate the “ethics of reciprocity” (which puts into practice the principle of reciprocating to others how we would like them to treat us) through dedicated educational actions and practices such as Danilo Dolci’s “reciprocal maieutic” : the practice of nurturing a generative space of active listening where participants can act as dynamic co-creators of knowledge through a learning process that can be understood as an inherently collective and political endeavour. • Both Addams and Dolci worked with marginalized communities, migrant people, and individuals with low literacy and within these contexts explored the actual possibility to create the conditions for the construction of spaces of encounter which would model the development of democratic communities as the grounding texture of a true democratic society based on the reciprocal acknowledgment of each and every one.