Conference Program

From its establishment until the end of the 1950s, the Italian school system maintained the aim of reproducing existing social stratification. This entailed access to high school for the ruling classes, and vocational training for the subordinate classes. Underpinning this type of scholastic structuring is an idealistic and elitist pedagogy according to which an individual is not a socio-historical product but a being endowed from birth with all the characteristics that will configure their fate. Schooling such individuals merely makes manifest the qualities already present in each, separating ‘talented’ students from students whose talents are not immediately visible or who do not conform to required standards. Political, historical and social changes in Italy since the end of the 1950s have contributed to bringing the school system in line with a progressive democratisation of constitutional inspiration. However, the elitist pedagogical approach applied in the reforms remains unchanged. It is no coincidence that, by focusing on enhancing graduate employability, competitiveness and ‘know-how’, the new educative and training strategies adopted in Europe since the 1990s have made schools similar to businesses, rewarding students able to use their skills to game the economic market and condemning those who do not ‘naturally’ adapt. Don Milani takes the opposite approach: for him the individual is an historical product who does not possess innate qualities and whose conscience is nothing more than the reflection of a surrounding fraction of civil society. This perspective, which we could define as ‘anti-idealist’, sites Milani closer to the thought of scholars Gramsci and Bourdieu, who were convinced that the social world is endowed with an immanent, objective and persistent structure and system of forces to which all things, including human actions, are subject. In education, denying this system of contingent forces means not admitting that teaching methods are likely to have differing effects on pupils from differing socio-economic strata. Espousing the rhetoric of merit, a school may thus further reward the most energetic and regular and condemn the most listless or nonconforming, effectively fueling the process of social inequity reproduction. In an attempt to block this process, Milani decided first of all to ‘take sides’ by dedicating his educational activism to the poor. However, his school did not provide poor students with notions to be acquired uncritically; rather, it adopted a maieutic method in the hope of seeing critical subjectivities flourish, gaining awareness and an ability to struggle to emerge from their condition of subordination. In developing this method, his critique of traditional schooling opposed obstacles posed to the poor in accessing culture, and also the ongoing process of cyclical retransmission of social classism in and of which under classes lacked means of determination and expression. That is, the method is not aimed at gentrifying the poor — the transformation and negation of their essence in a process of slow homologation — but at the acknowledgement of authentic diversity: the tools provided by the teacher should be useful for deciphering the social world, imagining alternative realities and freely expressing one’s subjectivity.

The contribution deals with the concept of “actualization” as a practice of generating new knowledge and - at the same time - community around values, that inspire actions in present time.

The authors work at the “scientia Atque usus” Research Center for Generative Communication (established in 1991), a Research Body of the Nonprofit Sector with a specific political and social mission. The group works on an idea of Generative Communication as a “common action”, bringing together those who do research with all public and private entities to create the conditions for the development of transdisciplinary projects that can implement concrete solutions and develop innovation.

The Research Center has been developing a project called “Don Milani Generative Center” (Generative Center) in collaboration with the Fondazione CR Firenze and the Fondazione don Lorenzo Milani. The Generative Center is a research and community building project to encourage the creation of a community committed to reflecting on social, cultural and religious issues inspired by the teaching of Don Milani. The common point of all the public and private subjects involved deals with the desire to implement communicative, formative actions with the aim of promoting social values such as: equity, inclusion, interculturality, justice (values inspired by don Milani and his “Barbiana School”).

This school was born in the sixties, around a church on a mountain near Florence. Without water, without electricity, don Milani decided to open a school for those who were rejected by the school institution (children of workers, housewives). The “Milanian method” inspired a way of living, studying and researching as social redemption, to rethink the value of "merit" but also to rethink the school as a cohesive community of students as future citizens.

The case of Barbiana is not replicable today, but its values constitute an immense heritage. The Generative Center works precisely in search of the "Barbiana Schools" of today: every class, every association where the people try to follow the same values.

First of all, we created a Scientific Technical Committee (with pedagogists, historians, constitutional experts, linguists) to analyze how the message of Don Milani can make sense in the current school, social, working system. Then the research group has been collecting the experiences of all the subjects involved (starting from those who, as students, met don Milani, then schools, association, publishing houses, researchers) to share - through interviews, articles, video testimonials - all the knowledge that can be useful to other schools, associations to realize the same action and activities in their own contexts.

The Generative Center is an application of “Atque” Design and Communication System. "Atque" not only consists in a suite of digital tools (called sAu Officine, sAu Library, sAu Matrix, sAu Academy): it’s a system to facilitate the cooperation among stakeholders in order to encourage and expand communities of interests around a project. In this way, an idea of knowledge as a common good is realized, arising from concrete contexts, and it can be shared to bring out solutions that can be applied in different situations.

What is a biography? A biography is a philological activity aimed at collecting and organizing events from a life. However, as philology cannot exist without criticism and vice versa (Toschi, 2016), biographical work also entails providing an interpretation, a key to understanding.

This statement holds even more truth for the biography of don Lorenzo Milani, whose life has been a contentious field between supporters and detractors concerning the relationship (or lack thereof) between philology and criticism. This debate is exemplified in the recent controversy sparked by Scotto di Luzio's (2023) booklet on Milani's pedagogical legacy and Cesari's (2024) pamphlet in response.

The ongoing, unresolved dialogue between philology and criticism is the crucial point of the project "Don Milani Generative Center”. The Generative Center is dedicated to those in academic and applied fields who daily revitalize don Lorenzo Milani's teachings and values. The term "revitalize" is pivotal to the project's ethos, but what meaning is ascribed to this term by the researchers at the sAu Research Center who are advancing the design phase of the Generative Center?

To revitalize don Lorenzo's thoughts, witness, and values involves first knowing them by reading his writings and accessing firsthand accounts, which is the realm of philology. Then, it means understanding which aspects of those texts and experiences cannot be decontextualized due to various reasons—historical, cultural, social, or personal—and what can guide behavior even in different contexts, which is the role of criticism. Ultimately, updating means repositioning those lessons in the current context, making them alive in the contemporary world, and continuously enriching them with new content and experiences, thereby redefining the relationship between philology and criticism.

To foster a critical, creative, and thus generative relationship between philology and criticism, the Generative Center aims to offer the Cronobook of don Lorenzo's life. The Cronobook, set to be freely accessible from June 2024, is a research and consultation tool based on content analysis of both the critical literature that posthumously reconstructed his biography and the direct testimonies from don Milani's private letters to friends and relatives, gathered in the second volume of his complete works (Milani, 2017).

The purpose of this tool is twofold:

1. To provide stakeholders (from both the scientia and the usus) with a biographical tool on don Milani that emphasizes the consistency between his life and his message, defining a philologically accurate and critically scientific biography, as a result of mediating various authoritative sources on the chronology of his existence and the autobiographical narrative extracted from his correspondence.

2. To experiment with a method of collective writing among researchers who have dealt with Milani's biography.

Once published, the Cronobook will become a collective writing tool capable of hosting diverse yet integrated contributions, thanks to a shared structure. Experts will be able to contribute by integrating or adding resources, references, and events, each bearing the signature of the authors who contributed to its identification.

A well-established approach Lettera a una professoressa considers it a pedagogical manifesto addressed to Italian school teachers. This contribution intends instead to propose a revisitation of the work of the School of Barbiana along two partially divergent directions, exploring in particular the relevance of the text as a contribution to the sociology of education and its nature as an appeal addressed primarily to parents.

In particular, the aim is to highlight the general character of Lettera a una professoressa, as the outcome not only of a pedagogical perspective and an educational, critical and reforming, passionate and experimental experience, but also of an exquisitely sociological approach of investigation, which unfolds from the realization of a statistical study on the issue of school dropout in Italy during the years of mass schooling. In addition to profiling the Italian school in the 1960s, amidst pushes for democratization, resistance to change and persistent selectivity, Don Milani and the school of Barbiana illustrate some of the genetic mechanisms of inequalities in education that constitute theoretical keys of enduring relevance.

Similarly, despite the focus on the functioning of the school system and the purposes of complaint of its shortcomings and iniquities, the text begins with the clarification that the book was not written for teachers but for parents and is meant to be an invitation to organize. It therefore seems legitimate to try to undertake a less usual direction of analysis, one that highlights the role not only of educational institutions but also of family environments and resources (the homes of the rich and the homes of the poor) as well as of parenting styles and practices in the production and reproduction of school inequalities.

“(…) No one sleeps, no one left out, everyone has a personal opinion ”. Don Lorenzo Milani wrote these words to his mother on 17th February 1955 describing his educational activity in Barbiana. It is based on a positive and formative environment in which everyone shares goals and knowledge. It was the beginning of a new educational method in the secondary school.

What about today? Does the school involve all the students in their education?

Can the didactic setting help the development of a cooperative learning?

Does the laboratory room give any answers to the prior’s incentive? Our learning units explain an innovative concept concerning the educational process in which the cooperative learning is the main principle to co-create innovative teaching programs.

The use of new educational technologies joined with a “traditional” teaching method provides a new learning motivation. The creative storytelling realizes new collective writing methods helping the birth of new ideas and situations.

Everyone plays a part in the process: the students work on an authentic task realizing

a final product. It describes its contents and explains the competences.

This year the perspectives of education in the Lettera a una Professoressa (Letter to a teacher) are used as research materials to understand how the past of our secondary school can offer new prospects of working on our present.

Difficulties, limits and lack of opportunities in education in the 1960s could be considered a way to give new life to the current school system.

We want to build a new educational path to stimulate a serious reflection on the guidance counseling, an educational way to build a bridge towards a mature and concrete future.

The future of our students starts from today, considering all the right pedagogical and didactic investments.

Describing the adventure of this new school year with the Prior of Barbiana is a great joy. A joy shared online with the audience of our institutional webradio: Deberes Radio: “ On air with Don Milani”. Our podcast contains thoughts and comments about Don Milani’s teachings born after the reading of the book “Lettera a una professoressa” (Letter to a Teacher).

For all the planning phases look at the following link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XmVGFD7RVUDAoh7yjUt8WceQtl3HytZT?usp=sharing