Looking at the future: Development, education, learning

Since the 1950s, Renzo Canestrari has been interested in issues concerning child development in its clinical aspects, with particular attention to the reforms of the Italian school system, especially the extension of compulsory schooling, the organizational consequences, and the need for adequate teachers' training. At the same time, the debate on the de-institutionalization of policies towards children with sensory, physical, and mental difficulties, kicked off research on alternative projects, in collaboration with the Local Authorities of the Emilia-Ro - magna Region. This attention to issues concerning development, education, and socialization in developmental age, with a look that connects individual aspects and social dynamics, has fueled empirical research by members of the Institute of Psychology, who have progressively expanded the fields of investigation. These are researches on: causal relationships between social interactions and cognitive development; characteristics of classroom communication and organizational and discursive routines in daily school life; representations that teachers and parents build and share about development, learning and education; socio-cognitive dynamics activated in students, during assessment tests held by Pisa international programs. These are dynamics ignored by the mainstream evaluation of the students' performances, but able to activate representations of school routines, through which students with low performances try to give meaning to the tests themselves. Similar dynamics are present in the representations of scientific disciplines, confirming the influence that the representations of the school system play in the construction of learning. Taken as a whole, in these lines of research it is possible to identify significant aspects that the legacy Renzo Canestrari has delivered in his work on development and education.