Towards a Pedagogy of Re(-)creation?

In Italian (but in other languages as well) the word “ricreazione” marks out a specific chronotopical realm within schooling, moreover one much longed-for by pupils: it refers to the 10-15 minutes break in the course of the classes – usually in the middle of the day – which pupils enjoy generally outside their classrooms. Marshalling a deconstructionist style of thinking, we could argue that the “ricreazione” is somehow a sort of skholē of schooling (insofar as this is reduced to a learning-oriented enterprise) and, therefore, “the ever deferred trace of its event” (this being said partly tongue-in-cheek). Without specifically undertaking a deconstruction of schooling starting from the ‘ricreazione’ as its chronotopical, experiential and existential “margin,” in this contribution I will engage with the whole matter by deploying and interweaving two different tenets of Dewey. First, the need for the school to become a space in which “reasonable forms of recreation and amusement” (MW 2: 91) are actively cultivated. I will idiosyncratically re-appropriate this theme, by endeavoring to uncouple it from Dewey’s idea of the school as “social centre” and to re-situate it within the horizon of the school as skholē. In this respect – and this is the second aspect of my argument – I will use Dewey’s reflections in Art as Experience on “having an experience” and “re-creation” as “[t]he junction of the new and the old” (LW 10: 66) to make sense of the school as the domain of re(-)creation and to explore its relationships with the school as the realm of study (McClintock, 1971; Ruitenberg, 2017) and with the vindication of the need for a return to a culture of the otium connected with the cultivation of arts (Fumaroli, 2011). In a sense, the proposal could be seen also as an exercise of “reconstruction of deconstruction” (Ferraris, 2010) and, therefore, as converging on a post-critical attitude.