ABSTRACT
Human beings spend a large part of their life participating to activities named “educational”. Schools, religious institutions, sport activities, scout-groups, music bands or army are particular contexts which human collectives have built with educational purposes. They are characterized by a public evaluative dimension, an affective tonality and the evaluation of the performances that turns into an evaluation of the Self. It is trivial to say that the life experiences occurring in these contexts have a strong relevance in the development of the Self. The real question is “how” – during specific periods of developmental trajectory, as for instance the school age – the others (e.g. the adults) are dialoguing in specific ways with the Self of the children and how those dialogues become mediating tools for the regulation of both the Self and the other. This could be conceptualized in terms of “influence” of the educational context on the construction of the Self. Nevertheless, we think this is a quite poor way of understanding the question. A truly dialogical approach should look for the complex work of meaning-making and meaning-negotiation involved in the polyphonic process of Self becoming.
