Home » The good teachers – Vanessa Roghi

The good teachers – Vanessa Roghi

by admin

March 20, 2021 10:02

Anna Marcucci Fantini, Maria Corda Costa, Dina Bertoni Jovine, Lydia Tornatore, Carmela Mungo, Maria Luisa Bigiaretti, Dina Parigi, Idana Pescioli, Giovanna Legatti Tamagnini, Nora Giacobini, Bianca Maria Pettini, Sara Cerrini Melauri, Bianca Fassino, Maria Bertini Casilli, Gina La Marca, Adriana Gerundino Ross, Luisa Tosi and many others. Names that say nothing to most and instead have accompanied the lives of boys and girls, girls and boys every day for generations.

Teachers and teachers who, starting immediately after the war, changed the Italian school in a democratic sense, in everyday practice. We never talk about them. The good teachers (and revolutionaries) are always male, the don Milani, the Mario Lodi, the Gianni Rodari, the Freinet, the Capitini, the Ivan Illich, the Dewey, and back to Rousseau, the ranks of pedagogists, reformers of the school is always all male. The exception that confirms the rule, Maria Montessori, is truly unique in twentieth-century Italian pedagogy. But who knows the names of Maria Boschetti Alberti or Giuseppina Pizzigoni?

Despite the fact that teaching is a profession that has become more and more feminine in the last century, the pyramid structure of the world of education has not changed at all, which relies on a base of women who educate children but who in turn study elaborate theories (and often taught) by men.

Social judgment
The latest survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the subject dates back to 2017. It is interesting to re-read the notes in the margins of the results: “In ten years, from 2005 to 2014, the presence of women in classrooms education, in industrially developed countries, grew from 62 to 68 per cent. A presence that decreases going from kindergarten to high school. Among the 22 European countries that adhere to the Schengen treaty, the presence of women behind the chair is almost total in kindergarten (97 percent) and dominant in primary school (85 percent). To slightly decrease in middle school (68 percent) and high school, where the presence of women in 2014 stood at around 58 percent. The phenomenon in Italy is even more pronounced ”.

Why don’t all these women assume a dominant role also in the world of pedagogical theory or didactic studies? According to Laura Parigi, researcher at the National Institute of Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research (Indire): “I think it depends on the social value attributed to the profession, which has been a typically female profession also because it is compatible with the work of family care. For a long time, teaching was considered a job that women could do to supplement the income of the head of the household (low salary, short hours). It is difficult, with these premises, to recognize an intellectual role. Education also probably had an impact: now perhaps this is no longer the case, but once upon a time the teaching institute was considered a ‘minor’ school compared to high schools ”.

See also  The health reform made the U party leave the government coalition - news

In recent times the teacher has been pursued, adored, sought after, the teacher has not. The basic idea is that the teacher can be mediocre, or even discreet, the teacher is exceptional. But on the other hand, it is a position that seems to emerge in other fields as well: TV is full of sublime male chefs (but are women, who have been cooking for hundreds of years, so bad?). Culture remains a male monopoly; women, in any field, can be average, not exceptional. The teacher is also sought after because in reality there are numerically few of them now, so they are desired.

Many teachers and professors changed education in practice, while colleagues turned experiences into theories

Santa Parrello, who teaches developmental psychology and educational psychology at the University of Naples, adds: “It is paradoxical that women are so busy in the field of education as teachers and do not give birth to original and systematic pedagogical theories like men. . With a few exceptions that confirm the rule, such as Maria Montessori in Italy or Vera Schmidt and Sabina Spielrein in Russia. All three have dedicated themselves to the design and implementation of non-authoritarian experimental schools, albeit starting from very different theoretical assumptions, challenging the regimes of Mussolini and Stalin. The Children’s Home and the White Kindergarten were first tolerated and then closed, and their personal lives were also affected by the violence of the dictatorships of the time. Their theoretical reflections are refined: Montessori then had a great following, while the two pedagogist-psychoanalysts remained for a long time in the shadow of Freud and Jung, and only recently rediscovered, but always as ‘pupils’ of the great, and also as ‘patients’ or ‘lovers’ ”.

Few pedagogues, many teachers and professors who changed education in practice, while colleagues collected experiences and transformed them into theories. This year we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the Educational Cooperation Movement (1951) a group of teachers who have staked everything on the renewal of the school on teaching: teachers such as Nora Giacobini, Anna Fantini and Luisa Bigiaretti have had great space within the movement and they deserve days of reflection and in-depth analysis, yet we prefer to remember Giuseppe Tamagnini or Mario Lodi when we have to mention some name that recalls that group of experimenters.

See also  A total of 39.47 million passengers were transported by civil aviation during the Spring Festival - Xinhua English.news.cn

I met Nora Giacobini while studying the historical bulletin of the Educational Cooperation Movement. Graduated in 1952, she teaches at the magistral institute of Montopoli, near Pisa, when she writes a letter to this newborn group of teachers to highlight how what they are saying is not only important for elementary schools but also for high schools (even today there is a strong prejudice that teaching is a relevant topic only for the lower levels of education).

Giacobini is convinced that abstract pedagogical theories can no longer be taught if one then enters the classroom and stands on the dais as has always been done:

It may be that the pedagogy teacher does not feel the question but if he does, it is absolutely impossible that he can continue to teach in the traditional sense. His own conscience prevents it, there is a need beyond example to demonstrate that he truly believes what is being proclaimed as critically true. Obviously, when I came to see clearly the contrast between saying and doing, the inconsistency of those who advocate a method as good without trying to put it into practice, I too fell into a state of profound discomfort.

Convinced of the importance of the reform of the middle schools of 1963, Giacobini, unlike many and many colleagues, will take a step back by going to teach at the lower grade for a militant choice. Since then he will remain in junior high, writing The sorcerer in the box (La linea 1976) a beautiful diary of his experience in an average of the Roman suburbs. It will be in Rome that he will meet the young master Franco Lorenzoni, becoming an inescapable point of reference for him.

And what about Anna Fantini who in Fano, immediately after the war, put into practice the theories of Célestin Freinet with her children, adapting them to the environment in which she finds herself, giving material for reflection to Tamagnini (founder of the Mce), or to Raffaele Laporta (pedagogist), who don’t teach us in elementary school (anymore).

See also  Di Maio 'flies' like in Dirty dancing: show in a trattoria in Naples

As well as a special memory deserve Maria Luisa Bigiaretti, the teacher of the Trullo, in Rome, who teaches Gianni Rodari how to write a collective text with children, or Giulia Notari and the teachers of Reggio Emilia that we remember today in relation to Loris Malaguzzi.

According to Parrello we can also venture a psychological hypothesis. “Are men more interested in thinking about education and women in taking responsibility for it? Or maybe men and women think together and then men systematize thoughts and build theories by assuming authorship? Jean Piaget worked together with a woman, Bärbel Inhelder, considered a refined researcher, who is always cited as his ‘collaborator’, despite her numerous independent publications. Obviously I don’t know how much you actually contributed to Piaget’s theory, but the doubt always came to me ”.

advertising

Even the movement of street teachers with which Parrello collaborates was born around the figure of a woman, Carla Melazzini. There would be no trace of her work – apart from that left in the memory of the boys and girls who knew her – if a man, her husband Cesare Moreno, had not collected her writings and published them after her untimely death in very beautifull Teach the Prince of Denmark (Sellerio 2011).

Melazzini’s diary is full of practices, theoretical reflections support experience, as when he writes, to invite us to use the metaphor in the educational process: “Years ago I read the first lines of the Metamorphosis by Kafka; then I asked the boys which of the family members they thought would agree to take care of poor Gregor Samsa turned into a filthy cockroach. The males unanimously answered ‘the mother’. Why? Obvious: because ‘pure’ or roach is beautiful to mom soy ‘. Only one girl suggested the sister. The next day I was in the library, Gianni, the smallest and ugliest of the class, looks out, asking timidly: ‘Professor, do you keep the rookie’s book here?’ “.

In school, as Giacobini wrote in 1952, it is much more difficult to undermine and transform practice than to impose a new theory. Starting over from the teachers and their lessons could be a good way to do it.

Internazionale has a newsletter that tells what happens in the world of school, university and research_. Sign up here._

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

Privacy & Cookies Policy