Discourses of care. Reflective diaries for an ethical vocabulary

Abstract

In a society characterized by violence in words and actions, the educative challenge is to give form to the Socratic epimeleia, a spiritual education that needs instruments capable to make flourish the soul of everybody. Among those instruments the most powerful is the statement “the most immediate ‘incarnation’ of the spirit”.

The educative research project MelArete proposes to the children experiences and words that are unusual, but found the Western ethics (Socrates-Plato and Aristotle): the ones that talk about virtue as an expression of care.

In this paper, it is presented the longitudinal analysis, carried out with the crossbreeding method (Mortari, 2007), of the “diaries of virtues” edited by 5 y.o. children: reflective instruments through which they reflect on their everyday ethical experience both telling and naming it and therefore generating “discourses of care”.