Care as a pathway to change: Chiara Giaccardi’s vision in the Guidelines for Inclusive and Sustainable Digital Education
Following the publication of the Guidelines for Inclusive and Sustainable Digital Education (available here), the Community Foundation of Agrigento and Trapani continues its commitment to fostering a profound reflection on the evolution of the educational system. The contemporary challenge is not just about integrating digital technologies into teaching, but also about how they can be used to imagine new educational models that can address the complex social, cultural, and environmental needs of our time. In this context, Chiara Giaccardi, Full Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, offers us an illuminating postscript that invites us to reconsider the role of education in the hyperconnected world we live in.
Care as a Pathway to Transformation
By Chiara Giaccardi Full Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where she teaches Sociology and Anthropology of Media and directs the journal Comunicazioni Sociali - Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies. She is part of the ARC Centre for the Anthropology of Religion and Generative Studies.
We live in an entirely digitized world. This is a fact, and recognizing the characteristics of our environment is essential to inhabit it in a meaningful way—a way that is not just about adapting but about adopting and creatively imagining it.
The educational system struggles to grasp the opportunities that, alongside undeniable risks, the present offers us. There is a tendency to use new tools along the paths of old methods, while the challenge ahead is to redesign the way we teach, learn, and acquire knowledge. We need to go beyond the barriers that are causing increasing disengagement, difficulties, inequalities, and dropouts: barriers between disciplines, roles (teacher and learner), theory and practice, abstraction and concreteness, and between the time of education and the time of work.
The growing complexity of the world we live in calls for a commitment to lifelong learning, and learning can no longer exclude direct engagement with reality or relegate it to a later stage.
Thus, there is no sensible way to move forward in this new technological environment, marked by pervasive digitalization processes and a planetary awareness that calls us to address both environmental and social sustainability, without a profound revision of educational and training processes. The challenge is to empower new generations and make them co-responsible for building new ways of thinking and acting that are up to the complexity of the world we have created. This challenge must reflect on educational practices: we must acknowledge that the established frameworks of the last century are no longer sufficient. We need to bring together different aspects of reality and overcome specialized and localized logic.
Today, what is needed is no longer just specialized technicians but people capable of a comprehensive vision; people who can imagine differently, approach problems critically and creatively; people capable of collaboration, of valuing diversity and each person’s talents to find new pathways; people capable of mobilizing everyone’s contributive abilities—this, perhaps, is the most authentic and effective form of inclusion.
We must recognize that education is not about training to perform effectively in the world as it is, but a pathway of change that opposes automatism. A path that requires the ability to restore, above all, the ability to pay attention in a world where attention is fragmented, miseducated, requisitioned by constant stimuli, commodified. And consequently, the ability to regenerate the capacity to discern, desire, and create.
Bernard Stiegler aptly highlighted the resonance between penser (to think) and panser (to care). In a hypercomplex world, it is essential to care for thought, for the ability to think. And the task of thought is care: taking care of the links between everything—our connections to the environment, the past and the future, to one another, to different fields of knowledge, to the concreteness of our situated worlds, and to the planet and peoples with whom we share a destiny.
Education, then, is about enabling an exciting experience that allows us to imagine differently, challenge assumptions, ask questions, design solutions, and find new connections. Teaching is not just about transmitting knowledge but about igniting a passion for knowledge that gives meaning to our lives—a knowing that is not separate from a way of doing and living.
There is now an inseparable link, which we have come to understand, between knowledge and experience. We learn both in theory and in practice. Theory, though necessary, is not enough. Abstract and concrete are not separable, much less incompatible, but are two sides of the continuous process of learning. In a rapidly changing world, we must move beyond the idea that we first learn (study) and then apply (work), and instead embrace the notion of a formative process based on the circularity between knowledge and experience. The underlying principle is to "learn how to learn," as Gregory Bateson taught. For this reason, the educational path must have a direct relationship with the concrete reality, its questions, its complexity, and its contingencies.
Intellectual development involves the body, the mind, the hands, the brain. The concrete and the abstract are in perpetual dialogue. Cognitive competence involves not only the ability to solve problems and manage difficulties but also to find new problems and imagine new solutions.
Developing imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and experimentation are all essential attitudes for asking the right questions to unexpected problems and for developing new solutions. In the complex context in which we live—what we have called the “supersociety”—what is needed are not just the skills to operate a given machine or to carry out a specific task (which are destined to rapid obsolescence or robotic replacement), but the ability to understand the context, to find alternative solutions, and to creatively and collectively develop new applications.
At a time when competencies are rapidly changing, education is necessary to re-establish a new meeting point between the demand for personal fulfillment and societal needs. Skills alone are not enough: we also need the ability to think critically and constructively. Competencies by themselves risk becoming merely instrumental to the efficient functioning of an increasingly entropic system. Instead, as Bernard Stiegler wrote, "to counteract the powerful entropic forces of contemporary society, we need a new form of education, which we call ‘epimeletic’.”
The etymology of the Greek word for care is enlightening. Epimeleia, from Melete, the muse of contemplation, is an "integral" term closely related to education and encompasses at least three dimensions: epistemological, existential, and political—three meanings that illuminate different aspects in their reciprocal interaction.
The first dimension concerns attention, the ability to see: to care, one must first stop, overcome distractions, and bring to light aspects of reality that are not immediately evident. Involvement changes perception, unlike the detached posture of the external observer. When you look from within, together, you see differently. And it requires time because speed, frenzy, and obsession with results are the enemies of attention.
The second dimension is that of solicitude, of dedication, of spending oneself: affection, emotional investment in a world that increasingly seems to be extinguishing itself, succumbing to "existential pallor" and social withdrawal—especially among the young, which is particularly worrying.
The third dimension concerns commitment, the ability to invest one's energies, as an attribution of value; to involve others, to mobilize, to exercise impact and change—a public and, if we wish, political dimension of care.
This is the quintessential educational dynamic, which allows for the shaping of oneself: to take form, cultivate one’s uniqueness in relation to others. In other words, to individuate and co-individuate, shaping a context. Not in opposition (identity threatened by otherness) but in collaboration.
For this reason, education is not about "conforming" but about "transforming" (regenerating knowledge, modifying contexts) and transforming oneself, together. Successful education, Stiegler also wrote, is always co-individuation, which can take place when the one who transmits knowledge allows themselves to be re-enchanted by it, re-examines it, and regenerates it in light of new questions, and is willing to enter into an open, transformative reciprocity with younger generations.
Rethinking education in light of these insights is an enormous task, but there is no other choice. The imbalance between our technical system and our capacity to adapt is bound to explode if people’s education is not adequate to meet new situations. And it is not about making minor adjustments, but about entirely redesigning the trajectory and structure of the educational process.
If, as Jean Piaget taught, "knowledge is a process of continuous construction," then it is necessary to update our educational systems to meet the needs of the world we live in and to view lifelong learning as one of the conditions for social sustainability.
Education must increasingly be conceived as integral: in relation to the construction of the person and their life project over the long term; in relation to the multiplicity of actors involved and the alliances that can support it; and in relation to the concrete involvement of the community, as the Drop-in project has intuitively realized and implemented.
This is an exemplary case because it expands the boundaries of educational imagination and shifts the limits of feasibility. Kant believed that what is real is possible, and projects like this can play an exemplary role in reconfiguring the frontier between the possible and the impossible, between the feasible and the utopian, and inspire new processes, which are more necessary than ever today, in this direction.
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The Guidelines for Inclusive and Sustainable Digital Education, [available at this ,](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14bNobx3aKkmC7oJI8V8M6UqrRAZxIN7A/view?usp=sharing) aim to provide clear and practical guidance for those looking to implement workshop-based activities focused on inclusive and sustainable digital education. They are designed to spread and promote the experience of the Fondazione Comunitaria di Agrigento e Trapani and to guide schools, third-sector organizations, and other entities interested in innovative approaches to digital teaching.
They are the result of the ongoing commitment of the Fondazione Comunitaria di Agrigento e Trapani to this topic, which began with Drop-in, a project selected by CON I BAMBINI as part of the Fund to Combat Educational Poverty in Children, co-funded by the Fondazione Peppino Vismara.
If you want to stay updated on the activities of the Drop-In project read the *project overview*, follow us on our social media channels (*Facebook* and *Instagram*) and on the blog *Percorsi Con i Bambini*.
To participate or for further information, contact Giuseppe La Rocca at g.larocca@fcagrigentotrapani.it