Conference Program

This contribution aims to shed light on Alberto Manzi’s adult popular education, carried on in the second-half of the 20th century, between Italy and South America. Whereas Manzi’s educational work with children has been deeply analysed in literature (Farnè, 2011), my research aim is to explore the teacher’s pedagogical-didactic approach in the field of adult literacy, which remains underexplored, focusing on different important moments in his path. Manzi was an author and presenter of the Italian television broadcasts It's Never Too Late – Popular Italian Course for Illiterate Adults (1960-1968) and Let’s Learn Together – The Italian Language for Non-EU Citizens (1992). Furthermore, he helped to create the Argentinian literacy radio-based program Better Late Than Never (1988). Last but not least, he had twenty years’ experience as a volunteer literacy teacher, in different countries in the Andean Plateau area, where he went every summer during vacation from his job as a teacher in an Italian elementary school. The main data sources of the research are television programs, interviews with key actors, teaching materials, novels, diaries, notes, newspaper articles and official documents. The methodology is qualitative based and results from an original combination of methods, to look at the different data types. Regarding the television programs, the 15-hour audiovisual corpus is analysed through Video Analysis (Derry et al., 2010) and Multimodal Analysis (Goldman et al., 2009). The main data gathering instruments for textual data are field and archival research, carried out through Italy and Argentina, on which a Thematic Narrative Analysis (Pagani, 2020) was conducted. The research points out how Manzi used different didactic strategies to pursue a transformative approach to adult literacy. One of the conceptual cores in Manzi's approach is the humanising and liberating scope (Freire, 2018) attributed to education, which is considered all the more important when carried out in contexts of marginality (Tøsse, 2010). Thus, the research contributes to the field of popular education studies in the Italian context (cf. Cotza, 2022; De Meo & Fiorucci, 2014; Torrisi, 2022; Vittoria, 2014), in particular in its historical dimension (cf. Curatelli, 2022; Meloni et al., 2016; Sardelli & Fiorucci, 2020; Secci, 2017). Furthermore, Manzi’s educational work is a great example of the pedagogical attraction (Secci, 2017; Vittoria, 2007) between Italy and South America in the field of popular education. To conclude, the research contributes to the theoretical debate regarding popular adult education between Italy and South America, and disseminates Manzi’s transformative approach among literacy teachers.

This intervention is part of a broader research project of the Department of Education Sciences at the University of Roma Tre that aims to investigate the phenomenon of the new emergence of popular education experiences with qualitative research tools, by choosing Rome as a privileged observatory. Indeed, today, popular schools play an important role to control the phenomenon of school dropout and new forms of educational poverty, helping to prevent and fight exclusion processes (De Meo, Fiorucci, 2011; Stillo, Zizioli, 2021).

According to the article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNGA 1989), popular schools have the heart of their pedagogical approach in the recognition of the right of girls and boys to be heard, perceived as active subjects, able to make choices. For this reason, we also chose to adopt a children's perspective in the research, conceiving it as research with and for children (Mortari, Mazzoni 2010). It was therefore decided to expand the initial tools by combining focus groups with the planning of a reading and drawing workshop aimed at those who attend after-school classes in two roman suburbs, combining participatory observation with Narrative Inquiry and Art Based Research (Barone, Eisner 2011).

The starting point of the activities was Gianni Rodari's rhyme Il cielo è di tutti, which highlights the more political dimension of his approach to writing for children (Roghi 2020) and the illustrated book by Marianna Balducci, L’ammiraglio ha preso il cielo (2022), freely inspired by Rodari. To each boy and girl was then given the opportunity to express their needs and desires about the popular school, the neighborhood and more generally about their future, through drawing and collage, starting from the gift of a "fragment of sky". Collecting children's voices through circle time and shared reading of words and images, and allowing them to express themselves freely by experimenting with artistic practices, confirmed the importance of using a plurality of languages (Barton 2015) to ensure that even the youngest can actively act as co-researchers by helping them to read and interpret their experiences and reality and recognizing them as protagonists and drivers of change (Tonucci 1999).

The intervention presented aims to return the first outcomes that emerged from this research and the developments of a project that is expanding, adapting it to different contexts, also in other realities of popular school and beyond, characterized by complexity, marginality and at the same time richness of possibilities.

The category of “people”, which has taken on different connotations since the Classical Age, traditionally refers to a group of individuals who have in common various aspects, such as territory, laws, religion, traditions, customs, and language (Benveniste [1969], 2001; Potestio 2023). Moreover, this category acquires specific features in relation to the concepts of “community” and “society”: indeed, a “society” (seen as societas) is characterized as an active way of individuals to live and operate within social organisations and structures, whereas a “community” (seen as communitas) is distinguished by a passive dimension (Bertagna 2010).
According to these considerations, the following contribution aims to analyse, from a pedagogical point of view, the category of “people”, which cannot only be conceived as a particular social group identifying with the nation and with the state, nor seen only as that part of citizens living in difficult and precarious conditions. In this way, the paper intends to propose a reflection on the role that this category assumes in today’s societies from a pedagogical point of view (Potestio 2023), in the awareness that, during the 20th century, the category of popular education has lost its meaning and centrality in the pedagogical debate (Freinet 1949).
It’s interesting to underline how the various forms of popular education in the Italian tradition (Bertoni Jovine 1965), understood in the two meanings of empowering the poorer classes and building a national culture, reduced the idea of the “people” as an object and a specific part of a plural identity (Potestio 2023). From time to time, people have been seen as the most marginalised part of society, living in economic and social difficulties within a larger group. In this direction, the category of “people” has been seen either as a single social class, or as a group of people lacking education or values who need to be shaped through the ideals and values of the dominant class. This cultural approach proposed, again, an invisible dualism that, by conceiving the existence of “two peoples”, has oriented every educational and training practice aimed at a “people” understood in an ideal way, not in real conditions (Cuoco 1799; Bertagna 2008; Damiano-Orizio-Scaglia 2019).
On the contrary, the category of popular education will continue to represent, nowadays, a central theme for analysing several aspects of the pedagogical and political debate about strategies to improve public school education, to enhance the function of the school system and to strengthen the connection between school and the world of work (Potestio 2023). Taking a pedagogical perspective, which does not reduce the category of “people” to a mere “object” and which focuses on the conditions and practices that lead a person to realise him/herself as an unique singularity through educational relationships, this contribution aims to highlight what are the key aspects in the category of “people”, seen «as an original tension that creates the possibility of transformative relationships between persons» (Potestio 2023), to understand the innovative pedagogical implications of this category in the contemporary society.

Talking about popular schools and popular education leads us to think about the past and the great educators of the twentieth century such as Paulo Freire, Don Lorenzo Milani and Danilo Dolci. Popular school’s experiences left their mark because they gave voice and space to the least and the marginalized. They were born as an antidote to the condition of educational poverty experienced by poor people in different parts of the world (Stillo, 2022). Nowadays, educational poverty is at the centre of the pedagogical debate because it is a widespread phenomenon that provokes others such as early school leaving and juvenile crime. Many young people today are called "street oriented" which means that they use to spend a lot of their free time on the way, in the streets and squares (Iavarone, Girardi, 2018) because they do not know where to go and what to do. The problem is that in the streets many of them also experience the first forms of deviance. In these cases, popular schools can be a bridge on the way, a place of possible inclusion, awareness and empowerment (Sardelli, Fiorucci, 2020). The intent of this contribution is therefore to reflect on the role that popular schools can have today to prevent and combat early school leaving and juvenile criminality offering experiences of transformative education especially for young people at risk of marginalisation.