Pedagogia e Autismo: per una formazione degli operatori alla didattica scolastica

The objective of this research is to address the theme of “didactics and autism”, with the aim to making a theoretical and practical contribution for those working within the Italian schooling system with students diagnosed within the autism spectrum. The argument is divided into four sections. In the first section it discusses how the education sciences have analyzed autism. After a historical construction that begins from diagnosis, contributions from psychology (psychoanalytic, behavioral and cognitive), genetics and Critical Autism Studies are analyzed. The section concludes arguing that until today science of education theories have not been able to consider the autistic person as a whole. Therefore these theoretical constructions and practices do not include the pedagogical perspective, which has not allowed the creation of a tested education for the individual of favored learning. Contributions from those authors who have theorized education for autistic subjects through special pedagogy has also been analyzed, demonstrating how pedagogy of personalism approaches would allow the person rather than their autism to be placed at the center, making an ad hoc construction more feasible. A pedagogical study is analyzed in section two, whose aim was to collect teaching experiences with autistic children in Italian primary education. The aim was to collect their individual narratives in order to discover their points of view on didactics. The analysis reveals that the child’s autism creates significant problems for the teacher. In order to determine if the autism was the major cause, further teachers within similar structures but without autistic children were interviewed. Comparing results finds that the child’s autism allows the teacher to ask more questions of themselves, both as a person and as an individual. However there is the remaining problem of the difficulty found in transforming human experience into educational experience, a factor that undermines their sense of effectiveness. The argument is therefor made for the need to invest in training teachers to help them acquire these skills. It emerged from the interviews that the teachers felt that the technical support (including those of the health services) as well as science of education and the pedagogic perspective contributions were extremely important. This leads to another problem: if the contribution of the educational sciences is perceived as fundamental, how much space is left for pedagogy and didactics? This question led to the formation of the third part of this study. A questionnaire was prepared and sent online to the teachers working in the Italian primary school system to discover their educational needs and wishes, as well as their points of view on the didactic methodologies. The analysis reveals that teachers across Italy use various methodologies, but in general feel the need for more contributions from the education sciences and pedagogy in order to construct a more personalized education approach. In light of the findings from these first three sections a course of training was proposed. Thanks to a child neuropsychiatric collaboration this training was trialled with a view of testing if such training would benefit the professionals in relation to their work with autistic children. This question has been presented in the fourth part. The positive experiences demonstrate that the proposal helps operators within their work and improved their sense of efficacy. Therefor I argue that a pedagogy of personalism could improve the didactic performance of professionals for all students and not only those autistic, contributing to redefining the sense of education itself.