School networks, enaction, and self-care: reflections on an ethical-epistemic understanding of collaborative work in education

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on school networks, questioning interpretations that predominantly view them as technical instances of coordination, improvement, and transfer of good practices. Based on the articulation between enactivism—understood as an embodied, relational, and non-representational conception of knowledge—and Foucault’s analysis of self-care, it is argued that school networks can be understood as relational ecologies in which forms of knowledge, processes of subjectivation, and ethical experiences of educational practice co-emerge. From this perspective, school networks and their collaborative practices are not reduced to the circulation of information or alignment with external standards, but rather involve ways in which actors relate to themselves, to other actors, and to the truth that shapes specific school worlds. The article problematizes the epistemological and political framework from which educational policies have promoted networking. Finally, it proposes thinking of school networks as spaces for ethical-epistemic experimentation, capable of opening up reflective and transformative processes, without closing them off in normative models or instrumental solutions.