Conference Program

This contribution explores the political and epistemological implications of pedagogical observation within contemporary educational contexts, marked by global inequalities, migration, queer invibilitation and persistent colonial legacies. Starting from the premise that observation in education is never a neutral act, the paper argues that observating educational processes means participating in the costruction of what becomes visible, intelligible, and legiitimate wthin educational discourse (Freire, 1970; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970). In this sense, observation constitutes not only a methodological tool but a situated practice that must be collocated in the filed of epistemological studies, and that shapes the ways educational realities are interpreted and governed.
This reasoning can be lowered in a field of research that looks at educational institutions in which structures of power related to class, race, gender and sexuality continues to organize access to recognition, partecipation and knowledge. Can pedagogical observation, therefore, become a critical practice capable of exposing the mechanism through which educational inequalities are normalized and reporoduced? Critical pedagogical traditions have long emphasized that education and observation alike are inherently political processes, oriented by specific systems of values and forms of knowledges (Freire, 1992; Lugones, 2003). Moreover, in this framework, the paradigm of aesthetic education offers an important theorical lens: drawing on pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, aesthetic education conceives learning as an experiential and relational process in which perception interpretation and meaning-making become central dimensions of knowledge (Dewey, 1934). From this perspective, observing educational processes means cultivating and attentive and reflexive gaze capable of perceiving the symbolic, relational and affective dimension of educational experience (Cambi, 2014).
Engaging in dialogue with decolonial and queer perspectives, the paper proposes to rethink observation as a relational and reflexive practice that can contribute to forms of epistemic justice within educational contexts. Rather than reducing educational marginalization to individual deficits or measurable outcomes, this approach interprets inequalities as historically and socially produced phenomena embedded in institutional practices and symbolic structures (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970).
Pedagogical observation thus becomes a form of aesthetic and political engagement with educational reality: a practice oriented not toward the normalization of difference but making visible what resists simplification and is forced to remain marginalized and to stay underneath the dominant educational narratives. Such an approach resonates with critical and pedagogical reading of LGBTQIA+ subjectivities as a critical place for the renegotiation of social pacts, analyzing the educational curvatures of representations (understood as aesthetic devices of symbolic transmission), with attention to the processes of stigmatization, cultural memory and the tensions between visibility, normalization and desire. An aesthetic education in queer curvature, and a pedagogical observation projected to aim attention on it, can be assumed as a pedagogical practice capable of reactivating recognition and citizenship, contributing to the construction of bonds based on the plurality of experiences.