Dialoguing on friendship as political virtue: an experience of citizenship education for primary school children.

Friendship is one of the objects of the second edition of the MelArete project, a program of ethical education designed by CRED (Education and Didactics Research Centre) of the University of Verona (Italy) to engage kindergarten and primary school children in reflecting on those virtues which are central for the development of citizenship. In this contribution, we will present some texts written by the pupils and the Socratic conversations about friendship, developed during the implementation of the program, in which the children were invited to define this concept. These conversations were recorded, verbatim transcribed and qualitatively analyzed following a methodological crossbreeding between the phenomenological-eidetic method and the grounded theory (Mortari, 2007). Also the written texts were analyzed following the same method. Findings bring to light what friendship is according to the participants and how they experience it. The results are finally discussed in light of the importance of such proposals in promoting citizenship education.