Creating Places of Public Memory through the Naming of School Buildings. A Case Study of Urban School Spaces in Bologna in the 19th and 20th Centuries, in "El futuro del pasado”, 7, 2016, pp. 441-458. (original) (raw)
Related papers
El Futuro del Pasado, 2016
Esta contribución pretende analizar los nombres oficiales de las escuelas italianas en los siglos XIX y XX, teniendo en cuenta estas escuelas como lugares de memoria civil, política y escolar. Estudiando la legislación nacional y en base a la investigación histórica de escuelas específicas en Italia, el trabajo se centra en la denominación de los edificios escolares que se encuentran hoy en la ciudad de Bolonia (Italia), durante el período comprendido entre la Unificación y la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Examinando fuentes de archivo aún inexploradas, el artículo analiza las motivaciones subyacentes a los nombres de las escuelas, los contextos en los que se debatieron y decidieron, las ceremonias de inauguración y los discursos oficiales relativos dados por las autoridades, las piedras colocadas o bustos expuestos dentro o fuera las escuelas y la compleja escenografía establecida para la población local que ofrecen un discurso «pedagógica» y, sin embargo político, como un auténtico patr...
Collettive and public memory on the walls. School naming as a resource in history of education
What do school names tell education and school historians? What do they reveal? This essay analyses the school names engraved on the plates affixed to school buildings, important «spies» of a collective and public memory sedimented into school culture over time. Starting from a case study of the city of Bologna between the 19 th and 20 th centuries, investigated in the archives and press records, particular attention is focused on the reasons behind and changes in the choices of schools names. What emerges is how school names, written on the walls and in the epigraphs, are shown to be the signs and instruments of political pedagogy readily promoted by the ruling classes, throughout the many metamorphoses of civil government between the 19 th and 20 th centuries, penetrating into the folds of school culture of entire generations. EET/TEE
This call for papers is part of the research activities envisaged for the project of significant national interest entitled School Memories between Social Perception and Collective Representation (Italy, 1861-2001). The intention is to continue the line of research inaugurated by the international symposium on School Memories. New Trends in Historical Research into Education: Heuristic Perspectives and Methodological Issues, which took place in Seville in 2015. The research project focuses on forms of school memory, understood as the individual, collective and public practice of remembering a common school past (Yanes-Cabrera et al., 2017). Individual school memory consists of self-representation supplied by former teachers, members of the school administration, and pupils through oral and written testimonies (e.g., diaries, autobiographies and memoirs in general). Ego-documents have also been widely used as historical sources in the field of historical-educational research (Viñao Frago, 2005) to reconstruct the history of schooling using the lived experiences of its protagonists rather than legislative and institutional sources, in an attempt to open what has been defined as the “black box of schooling” (Julia, 1995). Collective school memory, on the other hand, is composed of the many ways in which the culture industry (literature, cinema, music, etc.) and the world of information represent school time, teachers and pupils, and it is subject to appreciable transformations. These representations of school past become layered from generation to generation, partly superimposing themselves on personal memories, corrupting factual reality and consolidating themselves into stereotyped narrations. They may also alter our awareness of the past, which is thus transformed into a real space in our imagination that cannot be separated from scientifically-based historical reconstructions (Alfieri, 2019). Finally, public school memory consists of how schools and teachers are represented in official contexts and public commemorations promoted by local and national institutions based on a precise policy of memory, or public use of the past aimed at gaining consensus and reinforcing the feeling of belonging to a specific community (Yanes-Cabrera et al., 2017). Unlike individual school memory, collective memory and public memory have barely been touched on in historical-education research as they have not been considered a subject of historiographic importance for some time. In recent years, however, school memory – in its various meanings – has been included in international historiographic thought and has become the subject of studies of notable interest in the field of the history of education both in Latin-American countries and in the Anglo-Saxon world. The study of memory allows us to define how the present looks at the past and interprets or reinterprets it. In this sense, school memory does not interest us merely as a channel to access the schools of the past, but as a key to understanding what we know today or believe we know about schools of the past and how far what we know corresponds to reality, or whether our understanding is merely the result of prejudices and stereotypes that have become ingrained in the common sentiment, and difficult to uproot. The subject of this historical research therefore, does not consist simply of exploring school environments as they once were but consists instead of exploring the complex process of defining the sentiment that has developed over time regarding schools at an individual and collective level, based initially on lived school experiences, followed by other social and cultural agents which have contributed in part to redetermine it. This new research perspective allows us to address an aspect whose historical dimension has up to now escaped the attention of experts in the field: the evolution of the perceived social status of the various professional profiles involved in the processes of schooling and the public status of education within a community, as well as the public image of schools and the national school system. Studying the methods of collective symbolic representation of schools and teaching over time will help to define the origin of certain burdens that continue to weigh on the public image of schools, as well as making us aware of the overall cultural dimension of these historical phenomena. In addition, studies will restore awareness to all actors in public education of themselves and their roles. There is no unique, unequivocal school past. There are many of them, which often coexist and alternate with one another. They may conform more or less to historical reality, but they are nevertheless real and influence the views individuals or communities have of that past. This international conference aims to discover these school pasts.
This book contains a number of articles published by the author from 2006 to 2012 in the international scientific magazine «History of Education & Children’s Literature» (HECL) dedicated to the history of schools and educational and cultural processes in Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a whole, they reflect the three thematic areas around which an undoubtedly prominent part of research conducted by the author over the last 10/15 years has centred: the problems relating to the relationship between education, school modernisation and social-cultural transformations in Italy both before and after unification in the nineteenth century; the evolution of educational processes and scholastic publishing and school textbooks in Giolitti’s liberal Italy and during the Fascist period; and lastly, the role played by the school and by popular education in promoting constitutional values and in building the democratic citizenship of Republican Italy. Written while bearing in mind the more recent, influential guidelines of international school and education historiography and founded on precious archive and press material, these articles provide a detailed, original reconstruction of the socio-economic scenarios and political and cultural events that denoted the birth and evolution of the Italian scholastic system in the 19th and 20th centuries and at the same time made literacy and enculturation of the Italian people possible in the various areas of this nation. At the same time, they also shed light not only on the ideologies (and relative pedagogies) that inspired the basic guidelines and scholastic policy choices made by the various national governments during the different historical periods (from the liberal Giolitti era, through the twenty-year Fascist period, the post Second World War period and on to the advent of the republican democracy) but also the particular development of schooling in the same length of time from the point of view of the curricula and study plans in the various types and levels of education, teaching programmes and educational methods (subjects, methods, etc), and also the devices and tools used to support teaching and learning in the classrooms (manuals, text books, copybooks etc).
The following paper focuses on the original nature of Individual Written School Memories, shown by some commentaries published by the Italian primary teacher Marco Agosti in the Catholic teachers' magazine «Supplemento pedagogico a Scuola Italiana Moderna» between 1933 and 1938, during the Fascist regime. They dealt with the main results of his educational experimentations in primary school, according to his idea of education as the full development of each human being. An analysis of Marco Agosti's interventions reveals how they represented an original interpretation of the critica didattica, a new way of documenting research on didactics introduced by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, a partner of Giovanni Gentile in the preparation of the Italian School reform during Benito Mussolini's first government. As recommended by Lombardo Radice to all Italian primary teachers, also Agosti produced day by day some personal notes, which helped him to reflect on his first achievements and to improve upon them on the basis of a pedagogical in-depth analysis. They became a particular form of Individual Written School Memories, «sedimented» during the time he taught at the State Primary School «Camillo Ugoni» in Brescia and conceived for «public use» with a double function – one academic and the other educational, thanks to their publication in a teachers' magazine.
SMIRNE E L'ITALIA - The Italian Girls’ School in the Light of Visual Images and Written Documents
SMIRNE E L'ITALIA - The Italian Girls’ School in the Light of Visual Images and Written Documents, 2022
In the years following the Tanzimat and Islahat Edict, non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire gained equal rights with the Muslim Ottoman society in many areas such as religion, education and health: in line with the permissions granted by the government, the construction of buildings by non-Muslims gained speed. Especially, the fact that the population of non-Muslims living in Izmir was almost equal to the Muslim population, resulted in the construction in the 19th century of a dense non-Muslim infrastructure in this region. When examining the construction processes recorded in the archive documents, it can be seen that the permits given for these structures were closely monitored, by both the local and central government. This article focuses on the Izmir Italian Girls’ School, undertaken by Stefano Molli between 1904-1906, which has been the subject of many studies but the details and drawings of which are not mentioned in the archival documents. Detailed information concerning the acquisition of the land for the building, how its cost was met, the separate plan designs for each storey and the functions of the spaces and the design of the facades are given in the article, and lastly, inferences are made in the context of design concerning how the building affected the public buildings built in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods.
in «Glocalism», 2, 2021
This essay aims to investigate the connection between a local archive and global history, with a glocal perspective in a school environment. The work will deal with the archive of a high school in Milan, Italy, and examine how this community, with its principal, teachers and students, looked at (and was involved with) international events between 1935 and 1945. This was the period when fascist Italy declared war on Ethiopia and took part in the Second World War in its quest for an Empire and, later, for a new role in a Nazi-ruled Europe. Fascist foreign policy, which meant "war policy" in that period, and the way the Italian schools dealt with it became part of the totalitarian design of the regime. Changes in the local perspective regarding international events reflect changes in the regime's political agenda.
This is the program of the International Symposium «School Memories. New Trends in Historical Research into Education: Heuristic Perspectives and Methodological Issues» (Seville, 22-23 September, 2015), which will be attended by 95 participants from 54 universities and research centres of 21 countries. The organizing board of the symposium received an amount of 186 proposals from around the worlds, but only 71 have been accepted: 31 proposals for the session «Individual Memory», 32 for the session «Collective Memory» and 8 only for the session «Politics and Places of Memory». Such a high percentage of rejection (62%) was necessary to make the Symposium the most adhere as much as possible to the scientific programme declared in the call for papers, in order not to weaken the epistemological foundations of the reflection that we want to undertake with the help of all the participants. This first international review has highlighted different methodological approaches to a theme – the memory of the school – on which the historical reflection has been focusing for some years now, especially in the Iberian and Latin American area alike. This confirmed how even more necessary it was to organize an international meeting able to put a solid scientific basis to the development of a fertile research field.
2019
ABSTRACT: Studies of school memories have underlined the heuristic value of many new sources which have been underused by education historians until now. This contribution sets out to analyse the forms of public commemorations of school teachers and headmasters, understood as historical sources able to reveal many aspects of school, collective and public memories. Starting from the studies of obituaries of school teachers and officials in Italy, the paper circumscribes the area of investigation to the local case of the city of Bologna (Italy) from the Unity of Italy to the post-Second World War period. Some common aspects emerge over time in relation to the contents and forms of commemoration, but also the peculiarities in relation to the different historical periods and the different ways of remembering female and male school teachers, in a sort of «gender» commemoration.