Sandra Chistolini, PhD, has a long and extensive academic career, having taught various subjects in the fields of education and social sciences at the Universities of Macerata, Perugia, and Roma Tre, in Italy and having served as a visiting professor in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Her research interests include comparative education, intercultural education, and citizenship education; teacher training; and outdoor education.

Since the beginning of the Third Millennium, she has been conducting ongoing studies and research on the Pizzigoni Method, prioritizing contact with Giuseppina Pizzigoni’s earliest disciples. She conceived and established the Pizzigoni Fund in 2012 within the Department of Education at Roma Tre University with the aim of promoting Giuseppina Pizzigoni’s pedagogy and experimental method. She is President of the Association for the Promotion of the Pizzigoni Fund ETS, an organization dedicated to promoting, both in Italy and abroad, the theory and contemporary relevance of the experimental method devised by Giuseppina Pizzigoni, founder of the Scuola Rinnovata in Milan. Since 1911, the Pizzigoni Method has maintained formal
ministerial recognition.

She coordinates and oversees national and international projects and partnerships related to the Pizzigoni Method. She edits the scholarly journal “Il Nodo. Per una pedagogia della persona/The Knot: Toward a Pedagogy of the Person.”

More than 500 writings of Sandra Chistolini reveal the extensive research he conducted on educational topics, ranging from personal accounts to best practices. The most in-depth explorations of pedagogical identity are those that leave a mark on the transformation of the contemporary concept of school and lay the foundation for widely influential methods. In particular, her monographs on Gandhi, Tagore, Aurobindo, Steiner, Don Milani, and Pizzigoni are noteworthy.

Within the theoretical and conceptual framework of pedagogical personalism—which bridges the spirit and matter of existence—the value of a pedagogy that promotes the liberation of the multifaceted, dynamic, flexible, and transcendental human nature inherent in every person emerges. The articulation of the relationship between the theory and practice of existence is developed in innovative and original studies in which the concepts of nature and experience represent the foundations of outdoor education, as a new and polysemantic space for teacher training.