“Food for thought”: Blogging about food as dialogical strategy for self-disclosure and otherness

Education is still striving to find innovative ways of being effective and tackling the new challenges that society proposes. Students at school often report lack of motivation (Walkey, McClure, Meyer, & Weir, 2013), feelings of frustration (Pardos, Baker, San Pedro, Gowda, & Gowda, 2013), and a negative and stressful classroom climate (Ahnert, Harwardt-Heinecke, Kappler, EcksteinMadry, & Milatz, 2012). Collaborative learning, supported by the diverse technological devices available, seems to offer opportunities for empowering students' commitment in learning via metacognition, self-regulated learning and social processes (Järvelä & Hadwin, 2013). Of course, technology is not a magic stick. To be effective, it should be integrated into meaningful tasks where students can express themselves, work on interesting topics, and be involved in new ways of talking, writing, and discussing. When students can connect school tasks to their daily live, learning seems to me more motivated and effective (Hedegaard, Aronsson, Højholt, & Ulvik, 2018). In this paper, we present an Italian national project, named ‘Dialoghi IN Corso’ (DINC) – (Ongoing Dialogues) - based on students' team-blogging, designed as a school activity providing students with opportunities to talk about themselves. By doing so, we expected students to discover the value of discussing with peers, comparing different habits and values, and ultimately, better understanding themselves. The DINC project was enacted in 2016, within the framework of a broader international programme aimed at implementing intercultural and interreligious dialogue, run by a national network of 30 public schools called ‘Rete Dialogues’, initiated and supported by the Italian Ministry of Education with the Generation Global programme in seven Italian regions, widespread along all the national territory.1 The dialogical dimension – understood as the capability to enter in relationship with others through self-disclosure – has both inspired the tasks and guided the qualitative analysis of the data collected. Blogging is an interesting educational tool for many reasons. It is a type of asynchronous technology, that implies a time lag between the moment when the message is posted and the moment when it is read. Before posting the message, it is possible to reflect upon it and polish the content, making it more coherent to the thinking behind it. Similarly, before replying to a message the writer can re-read it carefully and make sure the content is correctly exposed. These lags – between thinking, reading and writing – can function as reflective practices, improving dialogue with others and within themselves. Blogging has some similarities to talking – such as length and style –as well as to writing (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004). Therefore, blogging can be considered a way to self-express, offering interesting options for disclosure, enhancement, construction and re-construction of positions.