PANTA REI Servizi Didattici di Biscossi Nadia
Centro "Servizi Didattici Panta Rei" is the most significant of the projects I have completed so far. Here, I had the chance to express myself and enact my potential as an entrepreneur, also leading a team of several teachers.
The Center still offers educational services, training courses and tutoring to children, teenagers and adults.
It was founded in 1990, as I had set my mind to make a real and potentially paying business out of the activity of providing after-school support to children and teenagers that had been keeping me busy at home, as it was and is common with university students.
Hence, the name was chosen: PANTA REI, echoing the Heraclitean “becoming”.
I had always cherished a peculiar idea of a school that might be realized through the model of humanistic-affective teaching.
Together with my staff, we decided to customize our teaching method for our 1-to-1 and group lessons so that the students’ skills could be enhanced. Our main concern was to develop a genuinely human relationship with our students and it was made possible by regular, stimulating teamwork meetings, during which we were able to put ideas together and detect the best strategies to enact, always correcting them as the students’ situation evolved. In our view, each student had to find their own “true calling” and get to good results in order to boost their self-esteem. Even the environment where all activities took place reflected our approach: classrooms were comfortable and full of colours; teachers used to sit shoulder to shoulder with their students; laboratories were designed so as to allow the participants’ self-realization and exploration of their own abilities, whilst promoting the encounter with “otherness”.
While at PantaRei, that approach and that method, together with my constant research for self-improvement and readiness at cooperating with professionals from different sectors– public school teachers, psychologists, speech therapists, sociologists, and artists –allowed me to embark on new professional challenges, such as teaching students with learning difficulties and/or behaviour problems, and teaching Italian as a foreign language. The very challenges that now require to be tackled from a different perspective.
For this reason, the life and soul of Panta Rei Servizi Didattici, which contributed to give shape to the person I am now, will not die out: its vision is now being pursued by some of my ex-students. I couldn’t have imagined a better way.
I will always remain a partner in this project, and, if needed, I will help as a teacher. I guess it’s the least I can do...
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Patrizia Pochesci has worked as a teacher at “Istituto Comprensivo Leone Caetani” (Cisterna di Latina) since 1976, becoming Head Teacher in 2007.
What makes Nadia outstanding is her great sense of responsibility and of moral duty.
She does not know what “compromise” (as a form of “Machiavellian” adjustment) is. In her view, the goal is always clearly set. Sometimes, the path she has to follow is fraught with difficulties and, more often than not, swarming with ill-concealed hostility. Nonetheless, she does not get discouraged, nor does she lose sight of the goal itself.
Alert to other people’s needs, and, in particular, perceptive to the issue of cultural deficiency, she has always looked for effective ways to fight marginalization and promote social rehabilitation.
While this might seem the portrait of a negative person, Nadia is quite the opposite.Her far-sighted cultural understanding has enabled her to engage in “colossal” fights, where she could prevail by means of the most ancient and effective communication strategy: education. “Education” must be read in the Latin sense of “ex-ducere”, to pull out, to extract, or – as those who work with young people know – to promote the constructiveness of every individual and give it the right evidence in the view of both individual themselves and society in order to develop self-fulfilment.
Through education, individuals can realize that social poverty has no value and can thus get free from the oppression of ignorance.
In addition,people keen on social discovery and protection could enjoy the initiatives she has always and is always proposing. Events that, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would put it, are heart-warming, like a plain – though never unsurprising – glass of water.
In fact, though in our Country the promotion of cultural values has been belittled in favour of a more profitable form of magnification, Nadia has been able to go counter this fashionable mind-set. As a real professional in the sector of cultural promotion, she has been able to support initiatives revealing the often-hidden features of the culture of those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. And these initiatives and features are off the beaten path of common trends and deeply plunged in everyday silent knowledge.
“Altissima quaque flumina minima sonolabuntur”: this quote serves the purpose of explaining that Nadia’s cultural and moral character is of great import and always person-centred: her strength, in fact, resides in discretion and in the respect she has for all individuals.
Patrizia Pochesci