L’epistemologia della didattica per competenze: dal sapere trasmissivo all’apprendimento situato

This paper examines the epistemological foundations of competence-based teaching, highlighting the shift from a transmissive paradigm to a transformative framework rooted in the active interaction between the learner, the context, and situated knowledge. Competence is reinterpreted as a dynamic and complex construct that integrates knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values within a process of reflective, contextualized action oriented toward citizenship. Drawing on the pragmatist perspective of John Dewey as a key theoretical reference, the article emphasizes experience as a foundational category of learning and identifies the reflex arc as an epistemological metaphor for knowledge conceived as a circular and meaningful process. This perspective calls for a redefinition of teacher professionalism, understood as a project-oriented, inclusive, and responsible function, capable of creating educational environments that foster autonomy, cooperation, and democracy. Within this framework, assessment is also interpreted as a formative and transformative practice, focused on learning processes and the development of subjectivity. Ultimately, competence-based education emerges as the expression of an educational project aimed at individual emancipation, social responsibility, and the shared construction of knowledge in complex and changing contexts.