Conference Program

The use of photos to represent educational experiences is a common practice at least from the XIXth century that has left traces of educational practices and ideologies. Yet, alongside other sources relating to the cultural heritage of education, it is only in recent times that they have used for a renewed history of education that broadens the horizons beyond the focus on educators and teaching methods (Julia, 2010; Becchi, 2010; Ferrari, 2010; Zoppi, 2016; Dussel, 2013; del Pozo, 2020).

In the 2021 the Pio Istituto dei Sordi Foundation in Milan has started a reorganization project of its photographic archive relating to the life of the Istituto Sordomuti Poveri di Campagna di Milano. This project has created a fonds of over 1.000 photos that concern the life of the institution between 1852 and 1967 with the aim of filling a serious documentary gap in the documentation relating to the history of education of deaf people in Italy. It is a fundamental documentation for the history of the Italian Deaf education because it concerns the era of the special school for deaf and their overcoming resulting from the so-called “inclusion law” (Law no. 517 of 1977). This material allows us to refine our considerations about the public image of deaf people in the era of the institutionalization. This image has been very little studied and the reference sources are mainly those relating to the sector-specific press focused on two main roles: “the unhappy one” and “the benefactor” (Des Dorides, 2020). According to this narrative script, Italian press represented deafness by systematically resorting to rhetorical terms and constructions that confined deaf people in subordination. The photographs, however, evoke a more complex image that is closer to the students' perspective: that of a place of relationships and growth in which many students, often for the first time, constructed their own world of relationships and self-image (Debé&Des Dorides, 2024). This collection was digitized, catalogued and it is now available to the public in digital format.

In 2024, on the occasion of the 170th anniversary of the foundation of the Pio Istituto dei Sordi, this perspective was the key for the realisation of a photographic exhibition with augmented reality content: “More than a thousand words”. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and the ideas of the Public History of Education (Herman et. al., 2022; Bandini, 2023), this exhibition, aimed at enhancing this cultural heritage, had the main objective of giving back to the community, with mainly visual sources, an alternative key to the experience of special schools for the deaf in Italy. Thanks to the development of a native app the use of images, archive documents and bibliographical sources merged with the stories of former pupils that come to life thanks to augmented reality allowing for in-depth multimedia content (texts, images and LIS videos). The aim of this paper is to illustrate the solutions adopted for the realization of the photographic exhibition and the approaches adopted to share processes and outcomes.