Teorías y prácticas de un aprendizaje personalizado en la historia de la escuela italiana

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs the transition, in the Italy after the Second World War, from an authoritarian and selective school to a democratic school interested to the needs and specificities of the person (De Giorgi, Gaudio, Pruneri 2019). After the twenty-year fascist period, the Italian school opened up to the suggestions coming from the different pedagogies that were spreading in the West: the movement of the new education and the activism, personalism, the pedagogies of dialogue, the pedagogies of liberation and emancipation (Cavallera 2015; Chiosso 2012, 2015). Through the reconstruction of some of the stages of the Italian school legislative journey, the slow and difficult path that, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, introduced personalised learning processes in the Italian school aimed at enhancing each individual pupil is retraced (Porcarelli 2017; Cicatelli 2018; Chiosso 2010). This transformative process of the Italian school was anticipated by the educational and didactic practices promoted by some teachers, new experiments that aimed to make the school a laboratory of democracy. Several were the teachers who experimented with a personalised approach to learning, demonstrating a strong commitment to adapting their teaching methods to the specific needs of their pupils. For example, the Don Lorenzo Milani and Maria Maltoni's educational proposals were aimed at personalise education. Don Lorenzo Milani firmly believed in the importance of adapting teaching to the specific characteristics of each individual (Lancisi 2023). Maria Maltoni was an Italian rural teacher who left a significant mark in the field of primary education (Maltoni 1959). She adopted a personalised approach to learning through direct knowledge of things with the use of drawings, stories, diaries and class journals (Maltoni 1939). Her inclusive vision of education helped improve the quality of education in rural areas by fostering a learning environment that respected individual diversity and valued students' everyday life experiences (Socci 2024). Along with the new methods, teaching tools that were introduced in schools were the school books that were increasingly devices for the education and for the cultural formation of the new generations. In an Italy that had just emerged from the devastation of war, started a process of fascistization that led many publishers such as Fabbri (Carotti-Andriani 2010) to overturn the very concept of school books. No longer containers of a packaged and artificial knowledge (Boero 2009) but more lively and stimulating materials intended to nourish the desire to read (Carotti-Andriani 2010). Considerable qualitative innovations and typographical renovations fostered ever stronger links with the sphere of the target audience (students and teachers). Thanks to the comparison with theories and practices of personalisation of teaching-learning, it becomes clear how the transition from an elite school to a school for all, which took place in Italy during the second half of the twentieth century, resulted in the promotion of a community school whose task is not only to educate to individualisation, but also to personalisation (Baldacci 2006) understood as a personal event, a process through which the subject is helped to take charge of his or her own life, becoming an actor and author of his or her own education (Bellingreri 2011, 2018).