Visible design

Revista Fuentes I.S.S.N.: 1575-7072 e-I.S.S.N.: 2172-7775 2017, 19(2), 23-38 http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/revistafuentes.2017.19.2.02 Author’s correspondence address: Pier Giuseppe Rossi. Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione, dei Beni Culturali e del Turismo. Università degli Studi di Macerata. E-mail: [email protected]. ORCID: 0000-0001-9801- 6307. © 2017 Editorial Universidad de Sevilla Visible design Pier Giuseppe Rossi Università degli studi di Macerata Recibido: 29/10/2017 Aceptado: 4/12/2017 ABSTRACT The presence of digital artefacts in the surrounding world holds both a structured and a structuring role that has an impact on the rationales with which we act and organise our behaviour and knowledge. The process that leads towards a major subject’s agentivity and towards a primary role of the design, useful to act in a complex context, is supported by digital technologies. Media Education takes us to new operative and cognitive modalities and promotes a critical attitude. Also at school, the design process plays a central role since the complexity of contexts, their fragmentation and the lack of “meta narratives/grand narratives” (Lyotard, 1987) requires that the teacher build situated rationales. Digital technologies can support the design process. Thanks to digitalisation, the design artefact becomes a fluid object that comes from the design, which can then be used in the classroom as a mediator and make students visualise the path. It supports the teacher and the students in their actions and it is completed in the documentation. The design artefact replaces the teacher in some routines, that is, the activities of the teacher to frame the class, to connect the present activity with past and future onesand to build a net of meaning that provides a comprehensive vision of the path. Those aspects affect the students’ guidanceand their motivation, but the presence of the artefact in the classroom also supports the teacher by fostering self-confidence. This is the proposal that the present article aims at deepening. KEY WORDS: mediation, digital, teaching. 1. Introduction: the fields of Media Education Media Education (ME) has two main areas of intervention: training the media and training with the media. In this latter case, ME has important points of contact with educational technologies. This contribution will focus on this latter field, training with the media, and will seek to analyse the impact of the presence of media not so much on the production and use of educational content as on the production and use of digital artefacts to mediate the structure of the educational pathway, an emerging topic in teaching and in ME. If, to date, didactic mediation has mainly been concerned with the use of digital materials to represent content, its focus today is now seen to be shifting towards the mediation of the mediators, that is, the mediation of the functions characterising the teacher’s actions, such as the construction of the curriculum, along with the presentation of the curriculum to the students, guidance and motivation. Such functions have always been explicitly present in the work of teachers, having emerged in online teaching through being reified by the para-text of the learning environment and its structure, as well as by certain introductory materials of the modules and curricula. In face-to-face teaching, however, the topic of the day is introduced, connecting itwith past and future activities, thus guiding the students and explaining the direction of the path and the choices (Rossi, 2016). If, in the past, a teacher’s activities were aimed towards introducing and guiding while framing and synthesising were given less importance (or, rather, were “transparent” 1 ), today, fragmentation, information overload and the wealth of available materials seem to require 1 These were activities carried out without complete awareness and without the research being focused on them. Pier Giuseppe Rossi Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 24 explicit and structured procedures and routines, together with appropriate tools. The need to render the cognitive and emotional processes explicit, in relation to the specific procedures, is a tendency also present in other situations. Nowadays, the means for elaborating a specific type of text or one with a specific or communicative purpose is just like translating a text in an ancient or modern language or resolving a problem, all being processes undertaken via targeted didactic paths. Even in the world of work, where apprentices would learn only through being guided each day and not through having any specific training, today this has become prescribed and formalised as the subject of specific educational pathways. The need to explain such processes required the creation of digital artefacts to support their design. We subsequently asked ourselves if it were possible to visualise the planned pathway in class, transforming the artefacts into a bridge/mediator between the teacher and the student. In online environments, the role of guiding, motivating and framing has always been played by the para-text 2 of each page. This feature serves as the introductory page of the course. The explanatory note included in the activity outlined or materials provided clarifies why and how to study a given material or why and how to effectuate a given delivery. What’s more, in these online environments, the succession of activities displayed as an outline in an introductory page does not only have an instrumental function, this being to allow access to individual activities, but also provides an overview and guides the student. The artefact explaining the design serve to mediate the mediators, functioning as a bridge between the teacher and the student, reifying the typical functions of the teacher, illustrating the path and the curriculum, indicating the curricular choices and the role of the didactic pathways (contents and skills) in the training of the student and in the development of the discipline. The hypothesis explored in this article is whether the explicit presence of this artefact is useful for improving the professionalism of the teacher and favouring the guidance and motivation of the student. Firstly, the article analyses the importance in today's society of the role of the student's agency and the construction of personal and professional identity trajectories. It then goes on to define the different meanings of mediation and remediation and, finally, to describe the transformation that teaching mediation is undergoing due to the effect of digital media, especially in relation to the mediation of mediators. 2. How knowledge and action change in the digital realm 2.1 The construction of coherence. As I write, news is emerging regarding the painful and traumatic attack in Barcelona on 17 th August 2017. Listening to the broadcasted news and compulsively searching for updates become an almost “active” form of participation, rather than simply receiving information. The analysis of communications throughout these days provides us with elements that are useful in understanding the functioning of the media. During the Italian news broadcast, the newsreader interviews a reporter live atthe scene of the attack. The reporter is asked to validate a news item. The reporter’s answer: “My information is the same as yours and it is the same that is reiterated by the agencies and simultaneously usable all over the world”. That is not all. When interviewing eyewitnesses, the information provided is useless and does not add any significant aspect, if not the emotional state of those present, being entirely understandable. From the Internet, television and newspapers, a thousand fragments are received: the painful and preposterous images of La Rambla, stories regarding the 15 lives cut short, the identikit of the terrorists, their websites, the tracking of their travels, the network of their friendships, the claims by 2 Para-text is made up of the elements, text and graphics, that support the text and its intelligibility. These often play a pragmatic role. All the information is from one page of text or a network that is not directly part of the text, but of the structure. For example, the page number, the main titles, the points of interest. Visible design Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 25 ISIS, the reliability of these, the presence of a connection (more or less stable?) between the cells, news alerts from the secret services, the statements of the various parties, the exploitation of numerous speculators, the connection between the attack and other processes underway, the story of the van rental attributed to a number of different subjects within a few hours. But even before being denied, tomes of words and judgements on social media had been dedicated to the information that subsequently turned out to be not entirely correct. It is a series of fragments of information relating to a global scenario, being produced in real time. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to trace them back to their origin, to the fact – consider the claims of ISIS or the warnings of the secret services. Perhaps it is the meaning of terms such as “fact,” “event,” “information” and “representation” that is being modified. Many of the terms at the centre of the discussions do not have a “real” point of reference, but are the product of network news, analysis, data processing and complex elaboration whose transparency does not depend on the will and intention of those involved, but on the processes adopted. Consider, in moving to another context, the calculation of GDP, unemployment figures, the determining of a nation’s healthcare expenditure or, in the educational field, the pseudo-science of meta-analysis (Bergeron, 2017). Economic data and political comments are based on such figures. In the last American election, Trump often used the amount of healthcare spending for Obamacare as a subject in his favour, with the data provided not infrequently fluctuating and differing greatly from that provided by the Democratic Party. The debate also included the cost of the Obamacare site, said to be $834 million according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, $2.1 billion according to the Bloomberg Government, and $5 billion according to Trump, as stated in a 2015 rally in Phoenix. Some of the previous information could be traced back to the source or the value could be calculated, but the time necessary would be so long that the outcome would no longer be useful in the debate. 2.2 Media Education and the construction of meaning Today, it is not always possible to trace back to the facts in order to validate information. Let us go over some of the previous observations. 1. The facts we normally discuss happen in a global scene; information arrives through media products that cannot always be verified. 2. Information is often the result of recursive processes, arising and being relaunched online and on social media, such that it often becomes difficult to go back to the primary source. 3. There are no longer any great narratives, which used to be compasses for interpretation. The fragments available to us intertwine different perspectives, each with its own field of validity and potential limits. Yet, the apparently direct relationship between humans and the world is increasingly mediated by screens, be they the consoles with which airplanes pilots interact, the screens on which surgeons operate, the coloured maps used by meteorologists or those produced for astronomers from radio telescopes. The concept of validation has changed radically. If reality is that on the screen, validation depends on the process of mediation and derives from the coherence that subjects capture from the fragments and their ability to exchange information with others, always being available online. The operations of verification and the intersection of data require time, further research and critical meaning (Kress, 2015a). In this way, the subjectivity of the "researcher" intervenes in the process of validation, both in the way that he or she seeks and accepts each piece of information, and in the way in which he or she constructs the network and judges its consistency. As highlighted by Guba and Lincoln (1994) in relation to qualitative research, epistemology and axiology travel in unison or, as more recently stated by Silverstone, “the medial competence of the subject cannot disregard the moral agenda” (2007, p. 264). Pier Giuseppe Rossi Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 26 ME supports such processes. First of all, it provides rhetorical and critical tools that help to evaluate the individual piece of information on the web: how to read it, what signs are significant in order to hypothesise about the quality of the information, what emergences should be highlighted. ME helps to identify the strategies for online research and to find convergences and confirmations intersecting with the information received. It thus supports the construction phase, that is, the assembly of networks and their visualisation. On the other hand, as Buckingham points out (2006a, p. 21; 2006b), the skills related to online reading and writing processes overlap. Finally, it permits the sharing of meanings and their negotiation with other subjects, other perspectives, other cultures. The sharing processes are linked to the participatory ones. Rivoltella (2012) identifies hospitality, justice and sincerity as the three key terms necessary to establish media education (Ibid., p. 22). Rivoltella opens up a connection between network construction and participation, emphasising that there is “a privileged relationship between media education and citizenship education” (Ibid., p. 21). The network can “become an opportunity for the construction of bonds, for the (re)construction of the community, the liberation of resources and energies of a territory” (Rivoltella, 2017). The process described not only has a cognitive value, but also a pragmatic one. It is an action both because its construction processes require the involvement of the activities of the individual, and because they require processes based - according to Aristotle’s Categories (1986) - more on wisdom than on knowledge. At its core is the subject who constructs the network and creates an interpretation/produces an action. 2.3. The fragment and complexity Drawing on Alfieri’s contention that the logic of the fragment is “the sum of modernity” (2012), it is possible to conclude that the subject is central for the construction of networks of meaning. The logic of the fragment derives from the end of great narratives (Lyotard, 1987), is present in hypertexts, structured by autonomous and connected fragments, in the lexicon (Landow, 1998), and in the first pages of newspapers (online and paper). The first page of any current newspaper presents between ten and twenty independent snippets and it is up to the reader to build a network of meaning that connects them. The pages of hypertexts, newspapers or websites are designed, but their design “embodies and presupposes the need for the semiotic work of the reader” which “redesigns the page” (Kress, 2015, p. 48). In the past, “reading was conceived in a completely analogous manner to the model of Saussure and perhaps even more so, to the Sender>Message>Receiver design (mathematical model by Shannon and Weaver). The ‘old’ written pages embodied notions of authority and authorship that were completely compatible with those models: the author assembled and organised knowledge on behalf of readers and arranged it in a textual form. Readers were faced with that textas-knowledge according to the order prepared by the author. It was the incarnation of a one-way and hierarchical dyadic relationship in which power resided in the author” (p. 48). It should be emphasised that the fragment can have positive and negative values. It is at the basis of ‘fake news’ in that brevity comes at the expense of argumentation, whilst emotionality and the common place prevail over rationality (Peters, 2017). At the same time, the autonomy of the single fragment enables the ‘agentivity’ of the subject and enhances his or her role (Kress, 2015b). A student’s piecemeal knowledge upon reaching school can also be described as fragmented, in particle form and, often, not validated. The different cultures present in the classroom amplify this situation. 2.4. Diversity, multimodality and agency Diversity is another figure of modernity. Tursi (2011), describing the thought of McLuhan, states that it has “a complex, non-dialectical path, linked to the attempt to preserve the presence of opposites, without imposing any synthesis.” The overcoming of a vision of the world based on oppositions in favour of approaches that shift attention to the relationships between opposites and Visible design Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 27 the construction of a network between them is present in the thought of the 1900s, starting from Merleau Ponty (1965, pp. 383-385) and has more recently been taken up by a number of authors (Summa and Finetti, 2010, p. 160). It is connected to the concept of ambiguity (Searle, 1994, p. 10), to that of ambivalence (Tabboni, 2006, Touraine, 2009, p. 170) and to the coexistence or “addition” of differences (Maigret, 1994). Among the contrapositions, which are no longer such, one can add that between nature and culture (Pickering, 1995; Rouse, 2002; Latour, 2004; Wehling, 2006; Asdal, 2003), between body and brain (Gallese, 2009; Rivoltella, 2011; Sibilio, 2014; Caruana and Borghi, 2016), between real and virtual (Lévy, 1998) and between theory and practice. Today, the Hegelian concept of synthesis is contrasted with that of ambiguity, in which the elements communicate/coexist whilst retaining many of their characteristics and autonomy. Once the concept of contraposition has been overcome, the relationship between different people and their interaction emerges already with Derrida, describing such as the coexistence of difference and articulation. He uses the brisure/hinge metaphor (Derrida, 1998, p. 97). The origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the tracing allows for the difference between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such in the unity of an experience, of the same lived experience starting from the body itself (Ibid.). Kress focuses on the theme of ambiguity in reference to linguistics, where the presence of “modes” enables the recipient of a message to adopt one of the many possible readings and provides the foundation for multiple directions, “according to the interpreter’s design” (Kress, 2015a, p. 73). Multi-modality, being the presence of numerous modes in communication (written, oral, iconic, gestural, film, music, action), increases the difference between the fragments. Each way has its affordance and “fixes” the meaning via its own perspectives and framing. This difference impedes hierarchy and linearity, all leading to the “orbiting” of language that becomes one of the many ways to communicate. If “dominant linguistic theories in the 20 th century emphasised abstraction and generalisation... a multimodal social semiotic approach to representation emphasises the material, the physical, the sensory, the body, the ‘therefority’ of things, far from abstraction, leads towards the specific and the variable” (Ibid., p. 121). If conceptualisation was once configured like the transition from concrete to abstract functioning and textual products were the highest point of knowledge, in a multimodal perspective, this hierarchy is lost as all languages have acquired equal dignity. Meaning does not derive from the process of abstraction, but from the reticular connection between the various fragments that intertwine in action: experiences, images, graphics, texts. Each contributes elements that acquire three-dimensionality only through mutual interaction. Action and knowledge become two sides of the same process (Maturana and Varela, 1985; Rizzolati and Sinigaglia, 2006; Caruana and Borghi, 2016; Rossi, 2011). The glue concept of construct that arises in the field of neuroscience has many similarities with Kress’s conclusions. Caruana and Borghi, reprising Murphy (2004), describe the concept as “a kind of ‘glue’ that holds our mental world together - past, present and future” (p. 2658). This glue bonds the “multimodal, experiential, motor and pragmatic components” and connects the actions through which the concept is articulated and used. The Semiotic Bundle (Arzarello and Sabena, 2014) has many similarities with this model of interpretation. From this point of view, each concept will also have a localised and positioned component in that it cannot be enclosed and expressed in a complete way within a single definition. It is connected to the actions and experiences that the subject has lived. In a class system, many elements of the concept can be shared experiences and the result of interactions and discussions between peers as well as with the teacher. Pier Giuseppe Rossi Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 28 The methodological semiotic lens offered by the Semiotic Bundle, in fact, could be useful in considering gestures and other embodied resources as resources through which communication and conceptualisation are forged (Faggiano et al., in press). 2.5. The centrality of design The autonomy of the fragment and the end of great narratives (Lyotard, 1968) favour the agentivity of the subject and can be read as a cause for anguish or, to the contrary, for valorisation. The agentivity of the subject feeds the centrality/necessity of design. From the standpoint of technical rationality, typical of an expert of the last century who knew how to perfectly execute the given procedures, we move on to the reflective professional who, in fact, knows how to interpret ever-differing contexts and knows how to choose the most suitable one for the context from amongst the various processes. Hence, we have training that is no longer aimed at acquiring knowledge and effective practices, but that focuses on the competencies and care for the development of one’s own identity. In the current context, design does not only indicate a process present in the human action of each period, but a way of being for the subject, whatever his or her position in the company pyramid. It is related to the means of dealing with the provisional and innovative nature of the 21 st century. “The term ‘design’ attributes recognition to the work of individuals in their social views, incorporating it into the theory. (…) Design emphasises the overcoming of an idea of communication anchored in convention as a form of social regulation. The term ‘design’ focuses on an individual’s realisation of their interest in their world” (Kress, 2015a, p. 15. Author’s trans.) and is based on the possibility of choice (Ibid., p. 38). 3. Mediation Mediation is a bridging concept present in the field of ME and in that of educational transposition, even if with different meanings (Chevallard, 1991, Damiano, 2013). 3.1. Mediation as remediation, trans-mediation and multimodality Bolter and Gruisin (2002) speak of “remediation,” a process that has multiple meanings. Remediation is hybridisation between different media, both analogical and digital, and between social agents and technological forms seen as two sides of the same coin. Hence, it is concerned with exploring digital technologies as hybrids deriving from the combination of technical, material, social and economic elements. Bolter and Gruisin’s definition of a medium as “that which remedies” (2002, p. 94) lends itself to a triple reading: “a medium is something that re-mediates;” “a medium is the set of things that it remedies;” and “a medium is the remedy.” In the first case, the emphasis is placed on the fact that “every act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. The means of communication need each other in order to function” (pivi, 82). In the second case, the emphasis is placed on the media’s ‘therefority’: the media as real objects in the world. “Mediation is the remediation of reality since the media themselves are real and because the experience of the media is the subject of remediation” (88). Finally, in the third case, Latin ‘redemeri,’ or ‘cure,’ is assumed to affirm that “every new medium finds its own legitimation, as it fills a void or corrects an error made by its predecessor, in realising a promise not maintained by the medium that precedes it” (89). By virtue of the second case, the third also states that the media are the reformers of that which is real (Tursi, 2004). If re-mediation originates in the English-speaking world and derives from the research undertaken by McLuhan, in the French-speaking world, research on ME proposes a term that has similarities with the preceding term, “trans-literacy,” which, as Jacquinot (2014) points out, does not correspond to the classical definition nor to the ability to use both analogue and digital media. The use of the prefix “trans” refers, rather, to the processes of transformation of the situations Visible design Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 29 connected to the annexed uses. It is not just a question of knowing the technologies, but or developing practices and participation. More recently, a term has been added to the preceding ones: multimodality. This concept, arising from social semiotics, draws attention to the relationship between the different modes used for communication and more than others highlights the overcoming of the language that assigns a satellite value to non-linguistic modes. It also focuses on literacy as a fundamental process of media education, a process that is mostly based on language (Kress, 2015b; Jewitt, 2005; van Leeuwen, 2005). 3.2. Mediation and didactic transposition For Damiano, mediation serves to articulate two autonomous and different, albeit interacting, processes: learning and teaching, an articulation that generates didactic action (the same experience, as Derrida would say) and builds the class, is an autopoietic system that exceeds the sum of its parts. Damiano (2013) draws on Bruner, who in turn draws on Piaget. Bruner identifies three classes of representations that support mediation: direct experience, iconic representation and linguistic synthesis. Damiano describes the process of mediation as a unique and holistic system, which is structured across four levels: active mediators (direct experience), iconic ones (drawings and outlines that allow for an initial representation of the concept and its first generalisation), analogical ones (simulated experience and role-playing games) and, finally, symbolic ones, "placed at the end of the process of metaphorisation, as they constitute the crowning" (Ibid., p. 205) where language is inserted as an instrument for the more abstract representation, which is also the most distant one from reality. For Damiano, the process of conceptualisation is one of metaphorisation in which “direct experience is transformed into something else that corresponds to it in some way and which can therefore stay in its place given that the direct experience is a sign” (2013, p. 169). Mediation in teaching, starting from the need to construct a bridge between learning and teaching, crosses the media and discovers in them the tools needed to articulate the educational process. One term is present both in teaching and in ME: metaphorisation. For Damiano: …if the transformation in which teaching consists is the substitution of the real for that which corresponds thereto, we can also recognise it as being metaphorisation: a transfer of field - etymologically derived from the Greek ‘metaphero’ (to go beyond), the same function that we find at the origin of languages, which are eminently substitutes for the experience they represent (re-present, present again, in another format) (Ibid., p. 169). Further on, it is clarified: …the function of metaphorisation is closely associated with our bodily structure and is at the basis of fundamental assumptions such as space, time, movement, counting and other original elements of human experience (Ibid., p. 170). But then: By synthetically coordinating such semantics, teaching can be considered as an action of metaphorisation of reality, which maintains an analogical reference – “as if” - with the original reality, representing it through models that in any case transform it into signs of another nature. Teaching as a process of metaphorisation, or rather of denaturisation of reality (Ibid., p. 171). Pier Giuseppe Rossi Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 30 Damiano seems to oscillate between a holistic process “closely associated with our bodily structure” and a hierarchical process that goes from the concrete to the abstract, from the real to the denaturalised. Metaphor is also central in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), to whom Damiano refers, and in Kress, for whom every complex sign is a metaphor created in the moment. “In social semiotic terms, all signs are metaphors, always made anew in the moment” (Author’s trans.) The process is no longer primarily one of abstraction, but of selection, of framing (Kress, 2015a, p. 108), of reticulation, a kind of putting into focus according to the interests and motivation that guide the “rhetorician” in the production of the message and the interpreter in its reconstruction. Each reticulation brings out a new system that presents new, different and emerging meanings alongside the meanings present in the components. Digital technology is now reshuffling the role and function of educational mediation, not being dependent upon a greater presence of media in the current landscape. Authoritativeness has changed, as it is now possible for different agents to create and manipulate the media; the ease of production has changed too and, above all, the time of production has decreased. In most cases, many forms of media are usable and shareable as soon as they are produced. Think of images and videos created using smartphones and made immediately shareable. Furthermore, the remediation and hybridisation of the media is overlapping with the production and sharing processes, in the sense that photographic images can undergo continuous morphing whilst transformations accompany the process of elaboration and metaphorisation, with the shots, and the meanings assigned to them, being modified in this way. With all the problems that this entails, analogy can be the basis for creative and generative processes, but also the basis for Pindaric leaps that are not always founded. 4. Mediating the mediators The behaviourist and process-product approaches and those centred on the teacher, in which it is the quality of the teaching process that mechanically determines the quality of learning, have been overcome. We have also transcended constructivist approaches, in which attention is focused on the role of the student whilst leaving the teacher to prepare the learning environment, barely participating in the action. Today, the focus seems to be on interactionist approaches in which, whilst sharing the active role of the student in the learning processes with constructivism, the importance of didactic interaction and exchange in the classroom is claimed as a characterising element of the teaching-learningprocess. Central to the interactionist approach is the unity of the didactic action (Durand and Veyrunes, 2005; Wilson, 2005; Vinatier and Altet, 2008; Altet, 2017; Laurillard, 2014; Durand and Poizat, 2017). The interactionist paradigm shows the articulation of different types of variables relative to the teacher, the student and the situation, to comprehend the teaching-learning process (Vinatier and Altet, 2008). Durand maintains: Research focuses on the teaching-learning process carried out as ‘an interactive situated process.’ This process refers to a unique situation in which single actors interact - teacher, pupils - in different sectors - that of didactic communication, of pedagogical relationships and of knowledge - that bring into play, in the dynamics of teaching situations the two dimensions that comprise the teacher’s work: the interactive dimension of communication and the finalised dimension of learning (2017). Vinatier and Altet (2008) ultimately underline that in the teaching action, Visible design Revista Fuentes 2017, 19(2), 23-38 31 …the activity of one is directed towards the activity of others, the work of one is the activity of others and this reciprocally, revolving around an object, is the knowledge in question (Ibid., p. 14). Even Laurillard (2014) offers the same perspective and proposes the Conversational Framework (CF) that emerges from a complete and complex synthesis of didactic research throughout the last few decades. The CF clearly and precisely indicates the cycles through which didactic interaction and the teaching and learning processes are articulated. They are the cycles of communication, practice and modelling, during which teachers and students perform the necessary activities in a continuous and recursive flow, In these, feedback, both from the teacher to the student and from the student to the teacher, plays a central role. Learning and teaching are two different and autonomous processes that interact. Once again, ambiguity is determined in the two different actions, in which, whilst remaining such, dialogue and emerging meanings contribute to both the construction of knowledge and the construction of the class as a complex system, with its own meanings, rules, relationships and conventions. This interaction can be described as a process of alignment between two trajectories that remain different and diverse whilst asymptotically approaching each other (Rossi, 2016). Mediation is divided into two processes: - The first, already amply described, is that of metaphorisation, through which meanings are articulated and further analysed; - The second concerns itself with the activities necessary to frame not only the content, but also the teaching process, rendering such a process explicit to the student for the purpose of motivation and guidance. This second process is defined as the “mediation of mediators” (Damiano, 2013), where the mediators are the teachers who carry out the role of a bridge between the student and knowledge, between the student and experience. It is on this that attention will be focused. 4.1. The roles of the teacher One of the teacher’s functions has always been to “frame” the pathway he or she is proposing. Before addressing certain content, the teacher provides a reminder of the global path that he or she is following and how the new topic connects with it; identifies the fil rouge of the contents and competences; indicates the problems that have emerged along the path; and motivates students by highlighting the interests that could encourage them to approach the solution to the problems, synthetically tracing the route that will be undertaken to guide them with regards to that which awaits them in the subsequent activities. At this point, live content comes into play. Yet, also highlighted during the lesson are all the connections that each new element has with the previous elements that the students are familiar with, so as to activate all the possible links to previous experiences and knowledge. Finally, the teacher also inserts the process within the complex framework of the discipline and anticipates future developments. Such a process of classification derives from the choices made by the teacher during the planning and reification of his or her disciplinary narrative. The framework weaves a fil rouge through the disciplinary knowledge of the teacher and his or her knowledge of the context, of the experiences of the students and of the knowledge of the class. If the process of content mediation is alsoundertaken with videos or materials produced by subjects outside the classroom, the process of framing and the connection between knowledge and the context can only be the result of the teacher and his or her specific knowledge of the situation. For the student, such a classification provides the reference on which to build new knowledge, the known elements on which to anchor the new. These are the footholds that allow