Marta Brunelli

Gymnastics between school desks: An educational practice between hygiene requirements, healthcare and logistic inadequacies in Italian primary schools (1870-1970)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution and use of the school desk in unified Italy as a multifunctional and highly efficient tool, which was required not only to efficiently support in-class activities, to facilitate the classroom management and finally to maintain a correct body posture in order to preserve pupils’ health, but also to accomplish the additional task of working as real “gymnastic equipment”, i.e. suitable for performing various gymnastic exercises inside the classroom. Design/methodology/approach The assumption upon which this paper rests is that school desks have always been signifiers charged with multiple meanings related to the evolution of curriculum, pedagogic ideas and daily school practices, which have often been forgotten, abandoned or, for some reasons, underrepresented in the official history of education as well as in the collective memory of school. In order to rebuild this forgotten history, and retrace the possible theoretical-pedagogical basis underlying such practice, the authors have systematically reviewed the Italian manuals on gymnastics between desks from the 1870s to the 1970s, retraced sources documenting this practice in the daily school life (government rules, school programmes, school hygiene prescriptions, iconographic sources, teachers and school managers’ testimonies) and finally, compared with other foreign practices (such as “calisthenics”). Findings The convergence between many differentiated sources has demonstrated the longevity of this school practice, which was not only the fruit of educational theories of gymnastic teachers but was also determined by the backwardness and logistic inadequacies of many Italian schools. The paper reveals how this gymnastic practice, after establishing itself in the post-Unification Italian schools, continued almost uninterrupted until the Second World War and even until the 1970s, evidencing how gymnastic teachers, hygienists, educationalists and lawmakers continued, over almost a century, to scientifically legitimise (from the top downwards) an educational practice that was actually driven from the bottom upwards, i.e. determined by an endemic lack of adequate spaces and tools for physical education in Italian schools. Originality/value For the very first time, the special source of Italian manuals and booklets on gymnastics between desks has been located, analysed and systematically reviewed for the period 1870s-1970s, and then cross-checked against differentiated sources. This study actually represents the first step of a research which must be still further developed. Undoubtedly, the “new” source represented by the manuals of “gymnastics between school desks” offered a first original perspective from which to explore the use of this furniture in the school of the past, thereby enabling historians of education to shed the first light on a school practice that has been overlooked or forgotten, and still hidden within the “black box of schooling”.

Snapshots from the Past: School Images on the Web and the Construction of the Collective Memory of Schools

The aim of this work is to provide an initial qualitative analysis of the role that historical school photographs play on the Web 2.0. In addition to its role as a historical source the historic school photograph is also a powerful visual mnemonic stimulus referring to what, in advanced societies, is a universally shared life experience: the schooling experience, in which people from different social, cultural and generational provenance can recognize themselves. School photography thus represents a “social object” par excellence, i.e. it is able to attract the attention of people and encourage them to talk to each other in order to recall and share common memories. Through social media, in fact, it is exactly this intrinsic social-relational function of school photographs which seems to amplify by catalysing the web-users’ interests, evoking shared memories, building connections between people. Through significant examples and case-studies, the author offers an initial review of the social practices to which school photographs are subjected today on the Web and social media, which show how new life can be breathed into the photographic heritage of schools—too often forgotten in our archives, libraries, museums, schools and houses.

Making the Italians : poetics and politics of Italian children's fantasy : note e appunti di lettura

The particular interpretive key which Lindsay Myers adopted in her Making the Italians: poetics and politics of Italian children’s fantasy (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2012) to re-read almost 150 years of Italian children’s literature, aims to retrace and legitimate the existence of a long, remarkable and absolutely original ‘native’ tradition of fantasy for children – just in the country where one of the most popular fantasy was written, Pinocchio. The scholar avails herself of a specific approach, derived from the Anglophone criticism, and which allows her to identify an Italian corpus of never previously acknowledged fantasy texts and authors, to analyse them in their intrinsic features, and to identify nine structural ‘sub-genres’ (or key fantasy types) which are deeply rooted in historical, political and social context in which they developed and were prevalent. An approach which makes the book of interest not only to scholars in children’s literature but also to historians of education and to social historians too. EET/TEE