About us

In 1986 I graduated in Philosophy at the University of Catania with a Thesis in Pedagogy on the initiatory model (my supervisor was Maria Teresa Moscato). In 1994 I obtained a Ph.D. in Pedagogy at the Catholic University of Milan, under the supervision of Elio Damiano; while I was working on my Ph.D.'s thesis, which dealt with the theme of school integration of Maghrebis in France, I spent 6 months at the CIEMI in Paris (the centre director was Antonio Perotti). In the following 10 years I continued my pedagogical research with Elio Damiano, Cesare Scurati and Maria Teresa Moscato, and I kept carrying out my main work activity as a tenured teacher of humanities (Italian, History, Philosophy) in lower and upper secondary schools from 1993 to 2005. I then took up service as a researcher at the Faculty of Education of the University of Bologna, where I held various teaching positions. In 2012, I moved to the Department of Arts.

Concerning the research activity, I operate within a phenomenological perspective developed by Gino Corallo, in Catania, and by Maria Teresa Moscato in Bologna. This perspective determines the philosophical-scientific approach which characterized the various pedagogical research paths that were so far explored. I have progressively dealt with contemporary pedagogical themes and issues connected to the social and anthropological dimension of school and family educational processes (e.g. multicultural society and interculturalism, civil coexistence, teacher training, family education, religiosity, artistic creativity).

Giorgia Pinelli, PhD, is currently a research fellow at the Department of Arts, Bologna University. 
She was awarded her doctoral degree in Pedagogy in 2011 at the University of Bologna, with a dissertation on theories of knowledge, teaching, and teachers as reflective practitioners. Her current educational research has a philosophical, anthropological and gnoseological focus, with an interest in epistemology and general pedagogy, training of teaching competence, affective education, religiousness and educational process, artistic expression and educational process. She is also a member of SIPED (Società Italiana di Pedagogia: Italian Society of Pedagogy).
Giorgia previously graduated with an MA in Philosophy at the University of Bologna in 2001, where she also gained two academic specializations in teaching, philosophy and history (2006) and teaching, philosophy and human sciences (2007). Since 2006 she has been teaching Philosophy and History in high schools, and in 2010 she began teaching Social Pedagogy in the Emilia Romagna Faculty of Theology.

I am an occupational psychologist who attended the Master's Degree in Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology and integrative university courses in pedagogy and philosophy at the University of Bologna. I work as a researcher, trainer and consultant mainly for public administrations at Studio Méta & associati. In the academic field I collaborate with the RES research group pedagogy of work studies.

I graduated in Philosophical Sciences in 2019; I worked as a support teacher in secondary school; I currently am a Subject Expert in General Pedagogy at the University of Bologna. My scientific interests and research topics include: general pedagogy, didactics of philosophy and history and pedagogy of artistic expression.

I arrived at the University of Bologna in 1992 as an Associate Professor of General Pedagogy, coming from the Faculty of Letters of Catania where I had graduated and started my academic career under the guidance of Prof. Don Gino Corallo. I had already taught and developed research activities, from 1972 to 1992 (school failure, emigration, and educational processes also in international contexts). In Bologna, I have been a full professor (from 2000) until retirement (in 2016) and I am still present as an Alma Mater professor. In addition to the many teachings in university courses, in Bologna I coordinated the pedagogical-didactic area of ​​the Specialization School for Secondary Teaching, from its inception until its suppression in 2008.

I worked on teachers’ training, myths and archetypes, family education and marital conflicts, religious education. I coordinated a national research project on religiosity and its dynamisms, and I still direct a FrancoAngeli series on religious experience.

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Education of the University of Bergen. My primary research interests lie at the intersections of inclusion and diversity, educational policy, and teacher training. In my Ph.D. work, I am exploring how teachers in Norwegian and Italian secondary schools understand the inclusion process of minority language students in their everyday professional lives. The project, which adopts a qualitative approach grounded in Jerome Bruner’s socio-constructivist perspective, investigates how teachers make sense of inclusion through narratives and how these narratives resonate with broader policy discourses.

Beyond my Ph.D. research, I have also engaged in studies on religious pluralism and diversity in educational contexts. Currently, I am involved in the inter-university research project Immagio, which employs a quantitative, survey-based approach to explore the narratives that populate youth imaginaries.

I am a member of the research group Founded, led by Line T. Hilt and focused on foundational questions in pedagogy from the perspectives of philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. I am also part of the research group RES - Ricerche Educative con le Scuole, led by Michele Caputo, which is dedicated to developing educational research with schools through collaborative and inclusive methodologies.

As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bergen, I currently work in the Teacher Education program, where I teach pedagogical subjects and seminars and support pre-service teachers during their internships. I have also taught History, Philosophy, and Special Needs Education in Italian secondary schools, as well as pedagogical and didactic subjects at the University of Bologna (as a teaching tutor for the General Pedagogy course) and the Theological Faculty of Emilia-Romagna (as a university lecturer).