Pedagogical and creative perspectives of handwriting, human heritage

In this article we are wondering if nowadays more than ever it is possible to consider as well-founded and emerging a pedagogy of the writing gesture, committed to recognise and support the creativity range of a complete educational process closely connected to certain dynamics that subtend the learning of handwriting, considered a common good and a human heritage. The increasingly widespread tendency to remove this educational significance, replacing the handwriting and its implicit complexity by using virtual technological instruments, apparently represents an unstoppable process, not devoid of pedagogically relevant consequences. The education of the writing gesture, supported by an adequate pedagogical theoretic, should continue to carry out an irreplaceable educational role also for the new generations, especially where writing can be considered as an essential creative expression for the Being, provided that the concept of creativity itself, as many authors claim, is made correspond with life itself and with some of its spontaneous expressions, intrinsic to human nature, like handwriting. This complex act entails, on one side, a tight interaction between the action of the hand and specific neuro-motor, perceptual-visual, as well as socio-anthropological and cultural components, and, on the other, a primary recursive activity between creativity and pleasure (the pleasure of writing). This latter term leads us to retrieve the value of the body’s experience and of the harmonious connection between the flow of the arm’s and body’s movements and the socio-cultural surrounding environment, from which can rise, if the educational context allows it, an active and sensorial involvement towards the graphic product, able to foster a doubtlessly more complete communication. It’s not by chance that in certain socio-anthropological settings handwriting is supported and strengthened by a centuries-old philosophy, and that in places like Japan (and not only), aesthetically declined, it is considered a veritable art form (shodō) and a medium thanks to which body and mind find themselves united harmoniously. Considering the complexity of the subject, the educational and pedagogical methods whose aim is to foster the process of abstraction required from the learning of the writing gesture, have always tried to answer, although in different ways, to the need of supporting handwriting in order to facilitate the individual development of the cognitive and affective dimensions of the child who is learning handwriting: it seems that we are now called, with ever more conviction, not to lose, but actually to strengthen the pedagogical coordinates of an ever more aware education of an important treasure for humankind.