Rethinking Educational Practice through Communication and New Technologies
Michela Marcomini (MA, University of Verona; current schoolteacher)
Educating in a time of transformation
Educational practice is increasingly shaped by profound social, cultural, and technological transformations. The rapid development of new technologies is not only reshaping pedagogical practices but also challenging our understanding of the educational relationship and the role of the learner within it. These transformations call for a reconsideration of the paradigms that have traditionally informed education, particularly with regard to the relationship between knowledge, human formation, and responsibility towards others.
In this context, philosophical reflection can contribute to a renewed understanding of education. Philosophy and pedagogy share a long tradition of mutual influence, rooted in the Greek notion of paideia and its ideal of the integral formation of the individual within the community. Today, philosophical inquiry can help rethink educational practice by placing the care of human singularity at its centre.
This article proposes that the educational relationship should be understood fundamentally as a relationship of care. It first examines the constitutive role of relationship in human formation, drawing on Martin Buber, and then explores care as a fundamental dimension of educational practice through the thought of Luigina Mortari, an Italian educational theorist. It subsequently considers the Italian philosopher Adriano Fabris’s notion of co-participation to argue that communication is not merely a means of transmitting knowledge, but a relational process through which meaning is constructed and subjects are formed.
The final sections examine how this perspective can illuminate two major transformations of contemporary education: the experience of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in learning environments. While distance learning raises questions about the conditions of educational presence, AI challenges the ways in which learners engage with knowledge, assess information, and exercise judgement. The article argues that critical realism, as developed by the Italian philosopher Davide Poggi engaging with the Italian thinkers Giuseppe Zamboni and Giovanni Giulietti, offers a possible orientation for addressing these challenges.
The discussion is guided by two questions: How do new technologies reshape the relationship and communication between teachers and learners? What understanding of care can guide educational practice in a technologically transformed world? Rather than offering definitive answers, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing philosophical reflection on how education can preserve its relational and caring dimension while cultivating learners’ capacity for critical and responsible engagement with reality.
“In the beginning is the relationship”
Moving beyond the conception of teaching as the mere transmission of knowledge from educator to learner, we can argue that
the learner is not a passive recipient of educational action, but a singular person whose identity and possibilities for development are shaped in part through relationships with others. Education therefore cannot be understood solely in terms of the acquisition of knowledge or the achievement of predefined learning outcomes. It also involves the relational conditions through which a person comes to understand themselves, others, and the world.
Martin Buber’s philosophy offers an essential point of reference for this perspective. In I and Thou (1923), Buber maintains that in the beginning is the relationship1 and that the relation to the Thou is immediate.2 These formulations challenge an understanding of the individual as an isolated subject whose identity is established independently of their relationships.
This principle is particularly significant in education. Educator and learner are not simply two fully constituted individuals who subsequently enter into a relationship; their encounter creates possibilities for mutual transformation. Buber’s notion of the Zwischen, or “between,”3 identifies the relational sphere in which this encounter takes place. The “between” does not belong exclusively to either participant, but emerges through their encounter and is renewed in each interaction.
Applied to educational practice, this perspective shifts attention from the educator’s actions or the learner’s characteristics considered in isolation to the quality of the relationship that develops between them. The educational encounter cannot be reduced to a predetermined transfer of content: it involves responding to another person whose singularity cannot be entirely anticipated or controlled.
The relational dimension of education therefore has both a formative and an ethical significance. To recognise the learner as a Thou means to approach them as a person rather than merely as the recipient of an intervention. This does not eliminate the asymmetry inherent in the educational relationship, since the educator retains specific responsibilities and obligations. Rather, it requires that this asymmetry be exercised in a way that recognises the learner’s singularity and capacity for development.
From this perspective, the educational relationship provides the starting point for understanding care. If education takes place through an encounter with another person, the educator’s responsibility concerns not only what the learner is expected to know, but also the conditions under which they can develop as a person.
Care as a Paradigmatic Dimension of Educational Practice
The move from relationship to care follows from the recognition that human existence is relational and that education involves a responsibility towards the other. Care is therefore not an additional element of educational practice, but one of its fundamental dimensions. In Luigina Mortari’s perspective, care is rooted in the vulnerability and incompleteness that characterise human existence.
According to Mortari, human beings enter the world in a condition of radical dependence and remain, throughout their lives, in need of both receiving and providing care.4 Care therefore precedes its pedagogical application: it is a fundamental dimension of human existence and of our ways of relating to others. Heidegger’s account of Care [Sorge] further illuminates the connection between care, human existence, and temporality, highlighting the role of care in the ongoing process through which human beings understand and shape their possibilities.
In education, care should not be understood simply as concern, protection, or the satisfaction of immediate needs. It also involves supporting the other in the process of becoming themselves. This requires attention to the learner’s present circumstances while recognising that their possibilities cannot be reduced to their current condition. Care entails responsiveness to vulnerability, but also a commitment to the learner’s growing autonomy and capacity to assume responsibility for their own formation.
This distinction is important because care can otherwise be confused with an attitude that merely protects the learner from difficulty or seeks to anticipate every need. An educational practice grounded in care must instead balance attentiveness and support with the recognition that learning involves uncertainty, effort, and the gradual development of independent judgement. To care for someone educationally is not to replace their agency, but to help create the conditions in which that agency can develop. The educational relationship can thus be understood as a relationship of care in which the learner is recognised in their singularity, welcomed in their vulnerability, and supported in their process of becoming themselves. Care is expressed not only in the intentions of the educator, but also in the concrete ways in which the learner is addressed, listened to, and guided.
This understanding provides the basis for examining communication. If relationship is the space in which subjects encounter one another, and care is the responsibility that this encounter entails, communication is one of the principal ways in which the relationship is enacted and sustained. The forms of communication adopted by the educator therefore become an essential dimension of educational care.
Communication as Co-Participation
If the educational relationship is understood as a relationship of care, communication cannot be reduced to the transmission of information from educator to learner. Although communication necessarily involves the exchange of messages, its educational significance extends beyond the transfer of content. It also concerns the ways in which participants interpret what is communicated, respond to one another, and develop a shared understanding of the subject under discussion.
Adriano Fabris’s notion of co-participation [compartecipazione]5 offers a useful framework for understanding this process. Communication does not simply transfer meanings that already exist; it establishes a shared space in which meanings, values, and interpretations can emerge, be questioned, and change through interaction. In education, this perspective calls into question the model of the teacher as the sole holder of knowledge and the learner as its passive recipient. Knowledge becomes a process of inquiry in which the learner is actively involved and the educator guides, questions, and supports the development of understanding.
This does not mean that the responsibilities of educator and learner are identical, or that their respective knowledge and experience are interchangeable. Rather, co-participation highlights the relational nature of learning: the educator remains responsible for the educational process, while the learner is recognised as an active participant in the construction and evaluation of meaning.
From this perspective, educator and learner are interlocutors who affect and are affected by their encounter. Communication thus contributes to the learner’s process of subject formation. The way in which an educator communicates can open up possibilities for questioning and reflection or, conversely, restrict them by discouraging disagreement and independent thought. Listening, recognition, and dialogue are therefore not merely interpersonal qualities; they are educational practices through which learners can develop critical thinking, openness to difference, and responsibility for their own formation.
Communication consequently becomes a concrete expression of educational care. Caring for the learner also means attending to the forms of communication through which the educational relationship is established and sustained. This creates a reciprocal relationship between education, communication, and care: the quality of communication influences the educational encounter, while the educator’s understanding of care informs how communication is practised.
Such a perspective is particularly relevant in contemporary learning environments, where communication increasingly takes place through digital platforms and technological systems. These systems do not determine the quality of an educational relationship in themselves, but they alter the conditions under which communication occurs. The central question is therefore how educational practices can preserve dialogue, recognition, and active participation when the encounter between educator and learner is technologically mediated.
Distance Learning and Artificial Intelligence
The relationship between education, communication, and care becomes particularly significant when considering the impact of digital technologies on educational practice. The experience of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic offers a first important example. Although digital platforms made it possible to maintain educational continuity during an emergency, the transition from the classroom to the screen changed the conditions under which the educational relationship could develop.6
When teachers and learners stopped sharing the same physical space, their gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other forms of non-verbal communication became mediated by technological interfaces. The temporal organisation of education also changed: the alternation between synchronous and asynchronous activities, together with the fragmentation of digital communication, could make it more difficult to sustain the time and continuity required for listening, dialogue, and the gradual development of relationships.
These changes should not be interpreted as evidence that technologically mediated communication is necessarily incapable of sustaining educational relationships. Rather, they reveal that educational presence cannot be identified exclusively with the transmission of information or the technical possibility of connecting participants. It also depends on the quality of interaction, the attention given to learners, and the conditions that allow them to participate meaningfully.
Byung-Chul Han’s analysis of digital communication provides a philosophical framework for examining these issues.7 Han argues that digital communication can reduce physical distance without necessarily producing genuine proximity: being connected does not automatically mean being in a relationship. The issue is not simply the absence of physical presence, but the risk that the other may be encountered primarily through the forms of representation and interaction made available by digital media, rather than recognised in their irreducible singularity.
Read alongside Buber’s philosophy, this critique raises a question about the conditions under which the Zwischen, the relational “between,” can emerge within technologically mediated communication. The educational challenge is not to reject digital mediation in principle, but to understand how it can be integrated into practices that preserve recognition, dialogue, and responsibility towards the learner.
Artificial Intelligence introduces a different (although related) transformation concerning the relationship between the learner and knowledge. AI systems can generate explanations, interpretations, and apparently coherent answers, thereby intervening in activities that traditionally required learners to engage directly in understanding, interpretation, and judgement. This makes the distinction between access to information and the development of knowledge particularly important.
AI-generated content may contain inaccuracies, reproduce biases present in training data, or present uncertain claims in a persuasive and authoritative form. The educational problem, however, extends beyond the possibility of error. It also concerns the opacity of the processes through which outputs are generated, as well as the difficulty learners may experience in evaluating their reliability.8 Without appropriate educational guidance, learners may accept plausible-sounding answers without undertaking the questioning, verification, and interpretation required for responsible judgement.
This does not mean that the use of AI necessarily undermines learning. When integrated critically, these systems may support explanation, comparison, exploration, and the development of new questions. Their educational value, however, depends on how they are used and on whether learners are encouraged to examine their outputs rather than treat them as authoritative substitutes for independent thought.
The role of the educator consequently becomes especially important. Educational care in the context of AI does not consist simply in protecting learners from technological risks, nor in accepting technological innovation uncritically. It involves accompanying learners in the responsible use of these tools, helping them distinguish between a generated response and a justified claim, assess the evidence available, and recognise the limits of their own and the system’s knowledge.
Distance learning and AI thus raise distinct but connected questions. Distance learning transforms the conditions of presence and encounter with the other, while AI transforms the conditions under which learners encounter knowledge and assess claims about reality. In both cases, the issue is how education can preserve the learner’s capacity for relationship, dialogue, and judgement within an increasingly technological environment.
The perspective developed in this article suggests that the answer cannot be found exclusively in the adoption or rejection of particular technologies. It requires a broader educational orientation capable of connecting relational care with the critical examination of knowledge. This is the point at which critical realism becomes relevant.
Critical Realism as a Paradigm of Care for the Future
Against this background, critical realism, as developed by Davide Poggi through his reflection on the thought of Giuseppe Zamboni and Giovanni Giulietti, can be understood as a possible paradigm of care for the future of education. Poggi presents critical realism as an observational and experiential approach grounded in the encounter with reality in its concrete and immediate dimensions. This perspective is connected to Zamboni’s conception of education as a shared search for reality, in which the teacher does not merely transmit knowledge but engages learners in a common inquiry.9
Applied to education, this approach involves cultivating a disposition to attend to experience, examine claims, test interpretations, and verify what is encountered. Rather than accepting appearances as self-evident, learners are encouraged to develop a responsible relationship with reality through observation, reflection, and critical inquiry. Fidelity, testing, verification, responsibility, decision, and realization thus become important orientations for educational practice, particularly in a context characterised by the rapid circulation of information and the increasing availability of technologically generated content.
The relevance of this approach to AI is particularly clear. When a system produces an answer that appears coherent or convincing, the educational task is not simply to determine whether the answer is useful. It is also to ask what supports the claim, how it can be checked, what assumptions it contains, and whether it corresponds to the available evidence. Critical realism therefore offers a way of approaching technological outputs without either accepting them uncritically or dismissing them merely because they are technologically generated.
Yet critical realism should not be understood as the imposition of a predefined truth upon the learner. Its caring dimension lies precisely in accompanying learners in their search for reality without replacing their own intellectual activity. The educator does not abandon their responsibility to guide learning, but exercises it by creating the conditions in which learners can question, investigate, and develop increasingly autonomous judgements.
Critical dialogue becomes a privileged instrument of this process. Understood as a shared and participatory search, it allows interpretations to be examined, reasons to be articulated, and claims to be confronted with experience. Such dialogue does not require the suspension of truth claims or the assumption that all interpretations are equally valid. Rather, it recognises that the pursuit of truth requires openness to questioning, attention to evidence, and a willingness to revise one’s judgements when reasons demand it.
Here, Poggi’s perspective can be brought into dialogue with Buber’s understanding of education as a relational process oriented towards authenticity and truth. The connection between these approaches lies in the idea that educational guidance should neither impose conclusions nor leave the learner alone in the search for understanding. The educator’s task is to accompany the learner while preserving the space for independent inquiry and responsible judgement.
Critical realism thus brings together the central dimensions explored throughout this article: relationship, communication, and care. Relationship establishes the relational conditions of education; communication enables participation, dialogue, and the exchange of reasons; care expresses the responsibility to support the learner’s formation without replacing their agency. Critical realism adds a further orientation by directing this relational and communicative process towards the critical examination of reality.
In an increasingly technological world, this perspective suggests that caring for education means preserving not only the possibility of encounter with others, but also the learner’s capacity to question, verify, interpret, and judge. The educational challenge is neither to shield learners from technological transformation nor to adapt uncritically to it. It is to help them inhabit this transformation with intellectual autonomy, relational responsibility, and a sustained commitment to the search for truth.
- See Martin Buber, I and Thou, Chicago, Lushena Books, 2024. ↩︎
- Ivi. ↩︎
- See Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, London, Routledge, 2022. ↩︎
- Luigina Mortari, Aver cura della vita della mente, Roma, Carocci, 2013. ↩︎
- Adriano Fabris, RelAzione. Una filosofia performativa, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2016. ↩︎
- Maria Antonella Galanti, L’emergenza come occasione per un ripensamento critico del modello aziendalistico di formazione, «Studi sulla formazione», 2 (2020), pp. 55-62. ↩︎
- Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, Cambridge, Polity, 2018. ↩︎
- Massimiliano Badino, Fabio Aurelio D’Asaro, Francesco Pedrazzoli, Educare all’IA. La sfida didattica dell’Intelligenza Artificiale: ChatGPT e Gemini, Milano, Sanoma, 2024. ↩︎
- Davide Poggi, Maestri del pensiero: Giuseppe Zamboni e Giovanni Giulietti (intervento tenuto in occasione del convegno Giovanni Giulietti, a cent’anni dalla nascita, Verona, 13 maggio 2015), «Atti e memorie dell’Accademia di Agricoltura Scienze e Lettere di Verona», 187 (2018), pp. 287-296. ↩︎