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Articles/Articoli

Vol. 17 No. 1 (2026): Educating for Complexity: Intersectionality, Decolonial Approaches to Teaching, and Practices of Care in Education

Grammar, semantics and care technique for vital teaching: An antidote to necrodidactics

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/ess1-2026oa22575
Submitted
aprile 15, 2026
Published
2026-07-28

Abstract

The complexity of school contexts, characterized by phenomena of educational exclusion, hegemony and discrimination, calls for a radical rethinking of educational action. The paper introduces the paradigm of necrodidactics (Liverano, 2025) to describe some didactic actions in which micro-aggressions, standardized micro-actions, ambiguous gestures and words are generated, which in the invisibility of diseducational micro-mechanisms, produce identity and educational annihilation, configuring themselves as a silent form of symbolic violence. In opposition to this educational drift, the article epistemologically proposes a didactic based on care, understood as an antidote that restores to teaching its vital, emancipatory and democratic vocation. Through an analysis that integrates the intersectional approach and the decolonial perspective, the three constitutive foundations of this proposal are outlined: the grammar of care, which defines the procedural structure; the semantics of care, which orients the content of meaning and significance of the didactic action, towards equity and justice; the technique of care, which declines its implementation situated in a reflective way. On the basis of this epistemology, the didactic action based on care, taken as an intentional political choice of the teacher, can be an option to counter hegemonic and colonizing logics, promoting an existential transformation of students and restoring centrality to inclusion, well-being and the democratic construction of knowledge. Finally, indicators and tools are identified to be used in an empirical research design aimed at scientifically validating the theoretical pillars of care-based teaching. In this contribution, only the theoretical construction phase of the tools will be explicit, which will be subjected to empirical validation through future research.

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