Didattica laboratoriale e virtualità epistemica: la manipolazione dei saperi come dispositivo generativo dell’apprendimento

The paper proposes a theoretical re-reading of laboratory-based teaching through the category of epistemic virtuality, understood as a condition of possibility within which knowledge escapes its objectified fixity in order to become available for reinterpretation, transformation, and the generation of new meanings. From this perspective, the laboratory cannot be reduced to a methodological device or an operational space; rather, it is configured as a pedagogical environment in which knowledge recovers its problematic, processual, and generative dimension. Approached from a phenomenological-hermeneutic standpoint, laboratory-based didactics is interpreted as a space for the emergence of the possible, in which the manipulation of knowledge constitutes an epistemic process of reconfiguration of experience and of the subjective construction of meaning. Learning thus unfolds as a transformative experience involving cognitive, imaginative, and emotional dimensions, thereby valuing error, uncertainty, and inquiry as conditions of epistemic generativity. This leads to a conception of the laboratory as a device of epistemic mediation oriented towards the construction of open learning environments, in which students and teachers participate in the co-construction of knowledge. Laboratory-based teaching therefore emerges as a formative paradigm capable of restoring centrality to subjectivity, reflexivity, and the generative dimension of learning, in response to the educational challenges of contemporary society.