Didactics of differences in teaching Latin and Ancient Greek, by Anna Chiaiese
Teaching and studying Latin and Ancient Greek to the triennium of the classical high school poses important critical issues concerning the languages, the sources, the canon and the relationship between the scientific literature of the sector and the textbooks, that systematically relegates gender (and the differences lato sensu) in separate sections of the volumes, as if to reiterate their perceived extraneousness to the historical narrative and to the formative dialogue. Otherwise, the teacher / researcher – moving from the reflections brought by feminist philosophies about the subject and the narration and by the contributions of historical anthropology – builds a didactics of differences in which has place both the uniqueness unrepeatable of subjectivity (of the teacher and of the learner) and the possibility of declining from time to time the function of differences (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political, religious, etc.) and their specific relevance in the linguistic, historical and literary discourse.
Keywords: Didactics, Differences, Latin, Ancient Greek, Gender.
Teaching the women’s history and gender relations in the Italian school: a project proposal, by Liviana Gazzetta and Franca Bellucci
This essay traces a framework of the history teaching and, in particular, of the gender history teaching in Italian schools. It mentions the last legislative reforms and the evolution of the cultural debate about the history teaching, with its alternating trend; and it traces the characteristics of a book (I secoli delle donne. Fonti e materiali per la didattica della storia, Biblink 2019) for teaching gender history that was designed by a working group of the Società Italiana delle Storiche. This ‘Syllabus’ presents ten diachronic essays about ten keywords and it gives many teaching cards with a choice of the sources of gender history from Ancient to Contemporary history.
Keywords: School reforms, history of identities and gender relations, Syllabus, Diachronic essay.
Developing tools to teach history of women and gender relations: considerations about an experience, by Elisabetta Serafini
The Storie nella Storia series stems from the union between the Società Italiana delle Storiche and the Settenove publisher, to describe the history of women and gender relations to children and teenagers. The aim of the project is to create a tool that is both informative and educational, given the limited purport these topics occupy in curricula, textbooks and training courses for teachers. Through this article we want to share the reflections about narrative and methodological choices: telling about women throughout history does not only meanadding new content but considering new problems, occasionally questioning traditional frameworks. In particular, we will focus on these issues with regard to the first volume.
Keywords: Women’s history, Teaching, Tools, Picture books.
The POLITE project twenty years later: a critical survey of the Italian state of affairs, by Irene Biemmi
From the late 1990s and early 2000, Italy took part in a European project called POLITE (acronym of Pari Opportunità nei LIbri di TEsto, Equal Opportunity in Textbooks). To date, it has resulted in the most widespread research and practical applications in our country in order to promote the principle of gender equality in educational knowledge. The project’s aim is to promote discussions on culture, teaching, and publishing by rethinking textbooks so that men and women, protagonists of culture, history, politics, and science, would be depicted in a non-discriminatory manner. This paper reconstructs the history of POLITE and evaluates the impact it has had over the past twenty years. Studies and empirical research on primary school textbooks have demonstrated that the POLITE recommendations are still largely disregarded and that textbooks continue to transmit an androcentric and sexist culture to new generations.
Keywords: Gender Stereotypes, Textbooks, Education.
History manuals for secondary school and gender historiography on the Great War: a difficult dialogue, by Monica Pacini
The paper analyzes if and how the way of telling the Great War has changed in the school textbooks of Italian secondary schools with particular reference to the women and gender history. There are about thirty texts of various publishers compared between the seventies of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. It aims to question the aporias between research and teaching as well as the difficult dialogue between the teaching of history and historiographical innovation. For the most recent years, I have also considered the additional materials addressed to teachers for the development of the skills of all the students (preparation for Invalsi tests) and for the activities of inclusive teaching (tools for Bes, Bisogni educativi speciali and Dsa, Disturbi specifici dell’apprendimento) from a gender perspective.
Keywords: Great War, Women and gender history, Italian school textbooks, Italian secondary schools.
Female traces in school archives, by Mariagabriella Calogiuri and Daria De Donno
The project Female traces in school archives sees the collaboration between the «Archive of the Salento female Writing» Laboratory active at the University of Salento with some ancient educational institutions of Lecce (Royal Normal School “Pietro Siciliani” and Royal Classical High School “Giuseppe Palmieri”), custodians of rich and long unexplored documentary collections. The training course, functional to familiarize male and female students with the historiographical debate on the history of gender, on the educational system and on the process of female literacy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aimed at involving the participants in a laboratory experience with research on sources of first hand, to highlight the dimension of the phenomenon of women’s access to secondary education, preparatory to the construction of future careers. At the same time, it has allowed to give back to a wide audience the complexity of a history of the women living on the territory that is part of the more general history of the same territory.
Keywords: Gender history, Local history, Cultural heritages, Laboratory teaching, School archives.
Beyond the horizon: reflections on the margin of an educational experience in a gender perspective, by Alessandra Fulvia Celi, Maria Amelia Mannella and Luciana Vietina
The text reflects on the outcomes of a three-year educational path, whose main idea was to go through a period of contemporary history, from the end of the 19th century to the 70s of the 20th, from the point of view of “gender”. The educational path, developed from 2012 to 2015 at Liceo Scientifico Michelangelo (Forte dei Marmi, Lucca), involved about 100 girls and boys of the last three-year period and 30 children from Fratelli Grimm primary school in Pietrasanta (Lucca) altogether. The educational experience saw the collaboration between the school and a local association committed to gender studies, “Women writings, memories of women” (Massa Carrara). The theme dealt with in the educational path is gender stereotype, discovered by the girls and boys through action-research, with the overall production of three school journals and a video.
Keywords: Stereotype, Gender, Action-research, Tutoring
Years of 68: active teaching for understanding feminism, by Virginia Niri
A workshop conducted in the latest high school classes provides a cross section of the difficulties in teaching post-WWII history, with particular reference to gender issues. The lack of an historiographic structure of longue durée and the closure of school textbooks to social, emotional and cultural history deprive students of the necessary tools to appreciate the importance of gender history; talk to them about feminism and politics makes possible a fruitful opening of the didactic relationship, which is accompanied by personal reflections according to the guidelines of the pedagogy of desire and complexity. Using active teaching methods it is possible to involve classes and teachers in an attempt to create a collective memory that can provide for the difficulty of relationship between teachers and the “Z generation” that, in its post-ideology, struggles to penetrate the history of the twentieth century: the history of feminism has great potential in this educational direction.
Keywords: Teaching history, Feminism, Long Italian Sixty-eight, Pedagogy of desire.
“Herstory”: images of women from the Egyptian Revolution to an Arts high school, by Monica Macchi
Herstory, a pun relating to the feminilisation of the term “History”, is a web project about oral history in Creative Commons, created by the Mosereen team with the aim of displaying the female role in the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. They do so in eight monologues. I would like to show how this project is used in different fields from academic dissemination, to artistic performances up to teaching in an Arts high school. I taught the Egyptian Revolution by means of its murals and my students have created videos and images for my show Quelle p(i)azze delle madri (for DTD. Donne, Teatro e Diritti Festival in Milan) about mothers taking to the streets to reclaim their missing children, kidnapped by the regime.
Keywords: Herstory, Revolution, Veil, Oral sources, Online archives.
Content and Language Integrated Learning, women’s history, gender history: a fruitful relationship, by Sara Follacchio
The intervention focuses on the provisions of the Presidential Decree 89/2010, which introduces in the second two-year period and in the final year of the language oriented high school and in the last year of the remaining high schools, the teaching in foreign languages of a non-linguistic discipline with CLIL methodology. This methodology can represent a fertile ground for the implementation of the teaching of both women’s and gender history, as it involves the use of educational strategies learner-centred, experiential and discovery based, and the use of Information and Communication Technologies and Open Education Resources, for the study and multimedia documentation of the results of the researches carried out. The very presence online of digital collections, free audiobooks, classroom resources and, therefore, of a rich mass of documents, images, videos, audio, that students can discover and use in the construction of presentations and lessons, is undoubtedly an opportunity with regards to a didactic of women’s and gender history. In order to spread this experience in the world of education, it is necessary, however, the contribution and support of training agencies aware of the importance of an insight towards the presence in history of female subjects and subjectivities and the processes of construction and redefinition both symbolic and material of roles and areas of action of the male and female gender.
Keywords: Gender history, CLIL, Digital collections, Educational strategy.
Teaching from a gender perspective in male-dominated high school classes: between stereotypes, careers guidance and free choice, by Chiara Pavone
Is there any connection between student achievement and gender? How do the gender stereotypes, and not only, influence the choice of school, determining the student’s job and the future scene of the working life? Is there any sharing of the targets between school and society? Or, on the contrary, is there a disconnection between educational proposals and the real social ability and willingness to welcome and support them outside of the school environment? This article proposes a brief observation on these issues also starting from the discussions on the school staff feminisation and it provides the particular perspective of upper secondary educational institutions that are usually composed for the most part by male students, in respect of the major chosen.
Keywords: Male high school classes; Gender education; Careers guidance; Stereotypes.
Cuba 1959: a year of revolution through the eyes of Italian diplomacy, by Valerio Giannattasio
1959 marked a turning point in the relations between Italy and Cuba. The Caribbean island suddenly took on an importance previously unknown in the eyes of Italian diplomacy and public opinion. The new course led by Fidel Castro was observed with interest: the revolution was hailed as a “young” movement and its leader often compared to a romantic hero. However, in a short time, the conflicts within the movement, the reforming impulse, although moderate, and then, the tensions with the United States began to arouse apprehension. Mistrusts began to spread therefore which would have led Italian diplomacy, from Rome to Havana, passing through Washington, to express disquietude about the socio-economic condition of the island and its positioning in the international arena, signalling the rapid rise of extremist currents. Elements that led to consider that just 12 months after its triumph, the Cuban revolution was starting to be a demagogic and «social-communist» regime.
Keywords: Cuba, Italy, Revolution, Diplomacy, 1959.
Towards a universal civilization. The journey of Senghor in Italy in 1962, by Leila El Houssi
Léopold Sedar Senghor’s journey to Italy in 1962 should be seen in the context of a phase in which part of the Italian political world revealed “third world sympathies”. These sympathies arose on the one hand from the need for Western countries to abandon defensive attitudes, increasing their efforts to provide technical and financial assistance to the Third World and on the other hand from the desire to gain international capability. In this context, the signing of the bilateral cooperation agreement with Senegal, signed on October 2, 1962, proved to be, for Italy, functional to a policy of regaining the international role in East-West relations, as well as North-South. For Senegal, Italy represented an important subject with which to enter into agreements that could provide concrete help in the process of building its country and Senghor, convinced of the need to build a political, economic and especially cultural dialogue with the West, became from that moment an important interlocutor both for the Italian government and for men of high political stature as the Mayor of Florence, Giorgio La Pira who sensed the value and geopolitical role of the Mediterranean area and the newly independent countries as a focal point of world peace. In this context, Italy had well understood that the agreement with the African country could contribute to lead it on an equal footing with other European powers.
Keywords: Léopold Sedar Senghor, Giorgio La Pira, East-West relations, third world, Africa, Europe.
From thugs to Ultras: Football and violent cheering in Italy from the second post-war period to the end of the 1970s, by Gianni Silei
The article is conceived as a first moment of analysis and reflection in view of a wider analysis of the phenomenon of violence and football hooliganism. The contribution therefore intends to reconstruct the evolution of violent football hooliganism from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, considered in particular from the point of view of youth deviance, describing its characteristics, following its methods of aggregation, its internal dynamics and, above all, through the reflections on the media of the main news events connected to it.
Keywords: Italy, Football hooliganism, Violence, Youth deviance.
