La Tutorship “scientifica”. Genesi e principi di una pedagogia della testimonianza per la formazione del ricercatore- The Scientific Tutorship. Origin and Principles of a Pedagogy of Testimony for Researcher Training

This inquiry, being part of the wider debate on the research training, is meant to analyse the issue of the scientific ‘tutorship’ as a pedagogy of testimony, whose genesis dates back to the past, to the classical culture of the Middle Ages and to the method of Scholastics, whose echo has gone as far as modernity. This pedagogy takes place within an education-training focused on the individual and on the possibility of promoting and enhancing it according to a spiritual and intellectual point of view, as well as on the genuine and exclusive relationship between an experienced Master and an inexperienced apprentice. This relationship is based on rational principles and categories, such as critical thinking, the exercise of memory, the pedagogic communication, intentionality and planning, as well as on relational ones, such as uniqueness, inter-subjectivity, faith, empathy, care, being for someone else. In order to be a pattern of education-training, today as in the past, this pedagogy requires specific competences, theorical and practical, communicative, discoursive, methodological and procedural, but it needs, above all, to be interpreted and put in practice by the master-tutor as a habit, research posture, in other words as a mark of personal testimony. The focus on testimony will rise several questions, first of all the one concerning the role and functions of the tutor for scientific research today and the filosofical and pedagogical competences necessary to play this role, as well as that on which extent of knowledge his practise of reasearch should have. All in all, this research practise, developing on the background of a phenomological-personalist approach, is to be considered as a real cognitive path of research-training to test.