Being teachers between inclusiveness and experimental pedagogy – Christian Raimo

This article was published on March 26, 2022 on page 22 of number 20 of the Essential. You can subscribe here.

We always talk about school for some lateral aspects: the final exams, the protocols for the covid, the dad; while it is difficult to find discussions that address the important issues, that is, how is it taught? How do you learn? What is the school for?

Yet the school experience is increasingly told as the matrix of relationships between adults, since the other twentieth-century places of informal and formal education such as the family, the parish, the association, the party or work are no longer able to be exemplary. It can also be seen in two recent Mondadori novels, one just published, the alternative matter by Laura Marzi, the other soon to be released, The suspended judgments by Silvia Dai Prà: in the space of the classroom we can still recognize the model of our being in the present and future world.

But in discussions on the school it is also good to keep in mind the state of the art of pedagogy and didactics. In recent months, for example, a text has come out that all teachers should read, Gert JJ Biesta wrote it and Raffaello Cortina published it, it is entitled Rediscover teaching and has two excellent paratexts, the preface by Francesco Cappa and the afterword by Paolo Landri.

The latter is a researcher at the CNR and during the pandemic period his texts were a light in the debate on digital education. Here the value of his pedagogical vision is even better understood: we are used to thinking of the theory of education as a discipline for insiders and we are unfortunately getting used to reflecting on education with trite formulas that only emphasize its aspect operational (life long learning, teaching by skills), while we should consider pedagogy a metadiscipline that makes its own the reflections of contemporary philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. All this means remembering the political vocation of pedagogy.

Equally precious is the tireless work of translation by contemporary and twentieth-century pedagogues on which Enrico Bottero is engaged, in particular by Philippe Meirieu, of whom he constantly curates an online section of the contributions in Italian on the site enricobottero.com.

Also by Bottero an excellent text has been published, simply titled Cooperative pedagogy and published by Armando. The so-called “Freinet techniques” were the basic tools for thousands of teachers, educators and teachers but today his texts are practically all out of print. On the other hand, the Educational Cooperation Movement is still alive in Italy, which was born taking inspiration from Freinet and has recently celebrated its seventy years of activity.

A volume recently re-edited by the Junior publishing house is also seventy years old and is a practically unknown classic of contemporary Italian pedagogy: Education and authority in modern Italy by Lamberto Borghi. It is a cultural and political history of the Italian school, from unity to the end of fascism. But it is not just an analysis of his genetic defects, but a reflection on how to transform an authoritarian, selective, classist and regressive institution into a large-scale emancipatory tool.

Today we ask ourselves much less than we did in the past about how to build a democratic school. But we can believe that this type of question finds its continuity in the current reflections on inclusion.

There is now an agreement among education scholars that experimental pedagogy and inclusive pedagogy converge in their objectives and methods; what we learn in the most complex educational relationships, perhaps with people with disabilities or with learning disabilities, is a treasure of knowledge that can then be reapplied in contexts that are only apparently easier.

For an overview of research in inclusive education it is useful to read the essay edited by Erickson by Andrea Canevaro and Dario Ianes Another didactic is possible. Examples and practices of ordinary inclusive teaching and the latest book by Fabio Bocci Special pedagogy as inclusive pedagogy published by Guerini. Each of these texts reflects on teaching in the simplest way imaginable: multiplying the possibility of didactic styles.

Here, a practice that continues to hiding very much in school: there is no observation. No teacher is asked to observe someone else’s work; it almost seems that this type of confrontation produces treason. So, since this practice of observation takes place very little live, you can take advantage of a guide that has just come out to the models of teachers that Italian cinema has told us: Davide Boero wrote it and it is called Film history of the Italian school, published by Lindau. From the masters of cinema and from our colleagues imagined by them, you can always learn a lot.

This article was published on March 26, 2022 on page 22 of number 20 of the Essential. You can subscribe here.