European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

188 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYAn approach to identity based on change dynamics rather than onebased on categories and nomenclature. Structure comes to be lessimportant than individual and/or collective mechanisms and strategiesfor action and assertiveness.Socialization processes are long. Throughout a lifetime, it is necessaryto teach and learn how to make changes and how to acquire referentsthat facilitate change. The process also involves the need for readjustmentin each individual, in face of the so-called new attitudes, such asintellectuality, cultural mobility, open-mindedness, the ability to survivethroughout changes... Professor Yves Beernaert will develop this idea inhis chapter entitled “The Construction of European Identity in theSchool as a Learning Communities”.The flow of everyday life and the complexity of everyday situationscause disagreement, disruption and dysfunction. Everyone ought to bea part of social and cultural production through objectivation to avoidtraumatised individuals and societies.Social, political and historical contexts are determining patterns: «I»as subject responsible for social relationships and identities. The introductionof the personal point of view in the appropriation of what ishuman and constitutes a basic choice, specially in the cultural experience.It is a response to three imperatives:—To avoid and elude the categorization and simplification ofprocedures.—To introduce discourse flexibility, caution and relativism, throughmultiple perspectives and points of view.—To acknowledge that in every act, the cognitive, the relational,the emotional, the practical or the symbolic have their own placewithin a network of subjective elements.Detecting some epistemological obstacles: culture diversityand disciplinary approachesNowadays, it could be said that the reorganization of knowledgeand processes in educational contexts leads us to necessary questioningof many of the ideas that have always accompanied us about who weare, where we are going to, our origin, our ethics, our social institutions,our “imagery”, our ways of contesting and, why not, about the verysense of our life.For all this, it seems convenient to transform questions intoinstruments. The idea that cultural tools are not only used to organise