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This paper is part of a broader research project dedicated to the analysis of the representation of Italian schools in audiovisual media, an investigation conducted on "atypical" historical sources from a Visual History of Education perspective, which led to the collection and examination of over three hundred works produced from the post-war period to the present day (Caprino, 2025). Building on this repertoire, the study intends to reflect on the construction of the imaginary and the representation of "non-conforming" bodies within the school system, with reference to disability.

The analysis investigates how cinema and television have codified the presence within educational institutions of those who, due to disabilities, neurodivergences, or learning difficulties, often intersected with conditions of socio-economic marginality, are classified as "different" or "deviant." Starting from the assumption that such identities are not merely biological data but products of specific institutional disabling devices (Oliver, 2023) that tend to fragment the unity of the human into rigid categories (Gardou, 2006), the contribution explores the persistence of narratives oscillating between objectification (often of a clinical nature) and potential paths of self-determination.

In fictional works, documentaries, and “cinegiornali” (newsreels), the figures of children and adolescents with disabilities are often at the center of spectacularizing narratives, bent to the logic of stereotypes (Bocci, 2025; Schianchi, 2023) or functional to the staging of other characters (the "courageous mother," the "counter-current teacher"), relegating "difform" identities to a passive role. Other productions, outside the mainstream (such as the works of De Seta and Mangini), are instead capable of challenging this gaze, restoring subjectivity and political agency to "out of frame" bodies, while simultaneously revealing what the institution has often sought to normalize or hide.

Through the lens of Critical Disability Studies, the paper will analyze how certain film and television narratives manage to dismantle the rhetoric of deficit, acting as a "critical observatory" that reveals the dynamics of privilege and oppression within the peculiar Italian educational context, recognizing the "other" subject as an agent of desires and resistance. The objective is to offer a reflection on how audiovisual media can act both as tools for the reproduction of exclusionary practices and as laboratories for the construction of more democratic and inclusive imaginaries of school and society.