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 (original) (raw)
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Summary This contribution sets out to analyse the official names of Italian schools in the 19th and 20th centuries, considering these schools as places of civil, political and scholastic memory. Studying national legislation and based on historical research into specific schools in Italy, the work focuses on the naming of the school buildings found today in the city of Bologna (Italy) during the period from Unification until the Second World War. Examining as-yet unexplored archive sources, the study investigates the motivations underlying the school names, the contexts in which they were debated and decided, the inauguration ceremonies and the relative official speeches given by the authorities, the stones laid or busts displayed in or outside the schools and the complex scenography set up for the local people offering a "pedagogic" and yet political discourse, as an authentic educational heritage of "public memory" and political pedagogy for the generations of the time and those to come. This study also shows some interesting surprises concerning famous and less well-known figures and personalities pointed out in the local school memory but legible on many levels of historical and educational interpretation. This work has confirmed that officially named of Italian school buildings are authentic places of memory assigned from birth to play a civil and public function for national education and cultural memory, as well as the literacy of the new generations.
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 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.
The School as a Model. Two experimental urban school building in Turin. 1968-75.
FAM, 2021
The heritage of school buildings constructed in the 1970s in Turin is one of the most interesting infrastructures of the public city in terms of extension and capillary diffusion across the urban fabric. The school buildings erected in the expansion areas envisioned by the Popular Affordable Housing Plans, which underwent great demographic changes in the last ten years, can be considered a resource for the present-day city. Through archive documents and the analysis of the relationship between built space and teaching styles, the present article explores this theme by looking at two schools in Turin, both of which were taken, at the time of their construction, as models of the relationship between built space and didactics
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.
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).
History of Education & Children’s Literature, 2019
The study falls within the perspective of Cultural History and School Culture, problematizing school architecture as historical-educational heritage. It investigates the first buildings constructed in the period of First Brazilian Republic, in which discourses concerning the need to build adequate school spaces for children were lined up with the ideal of quantitative and qualitative improvement of primary education. It analyzes a documentary corpus composed of Reports by the Direction of Public Instruction and Public Works of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, as well as photographs, floor plants, projects and documents from school archives. The research shows that the school building is a material support for school culture conservation, and relates it to preservation and conservation policies.