Lo studio della religione come strumento per lo sviluppo delle competenze di cittadinanza

The school should provide students with the tools in terms of knowledge and skills to build their consciences in a critical sense and develop a mature civic conscience in them. School curricula provide a part of these tools through disciplinary knowledge and skills, including the teaching of civic education. What is in place, however, is sometimes not enough. Since 2020, Italian schools have included Civic Education in its training proposal: a transversal discipline that aims to trace a path to train responsible citizens. This objective intercepts the aims of the Social Doctrine which aims "at the promotion of every man and of the whole man" and which enjoys, in educational institutions, a privileged mediator: the teaching of the Catholic religion. But what, from a regulatory and methodological point of view, are the potentials underlying the synergistic collaboration of the three disciplinary areas? What skills in terms of active citizenship can this synergy generate? In this speech we want to reflect on these questions and present activities carried out in a school context. In particular, the projects carried out in the field of the Social Doctrine of the Church and the projects within the Paths for transversal skills and orientation at the Centro Astalli and the Penny Wirton school in Rome will be presented. Concepts such as: self-efficacy, motivation and imitation will be emphasized and discussed to highlight the versatility of social learning for the acquisition of skills attributable to the specific contents of the Teaching of the Catholic Religion and aimed at the exercise of active citizenship.