Pratica formativa e pratica di ricerca nel lavoro educativo e sociale: riflessioni pedagogiche a partire dall'esperienza di Keats Aps | Training and research practices in educational and social work: pedagogical reflections from Keats's experience

In this paper, starting from the experience of Keats Aps, the authors question and reflect on the existence of a structural relationship between research and training, an existence that can be visible in the formative effects that the practice of research produces on the researchers themselves. This structural relationship, then, can be said to be effective if and when the professionals enact a gaze that continuously interrogates the practices, context and effects generated by the experience. From this perspective, the research, understood as practice, is configured as a cognitive tool if it has a number of conditions, such as being systematic, explicit, intentional and logical. This within the reflection presented here leads to the assertion that, doing pedagogical research “in” and “about” the social and educational context means continuously analyzing and reflecting on it. Not only that, pedagogical and social research takes on the meaning of an authentic “hand-to-hand with factuality” (Demetrio, 2020, p. XVII), since it is expressed in a process within which the researcher stands in an original and intimate contact with real problems. Thus, the structural nexus between research and education reflects, therefore, a certain way of understanding the relationship between theory and practice in the educational, training, social and pedagogical fields, that is, the existence of a circular relationship between theory and practice, since it is the educational and social practices themselves that provide the data and content that constitute the problems of research (Dewey, 1929).