Up Schooling

Note

Foreword

Roberto Maragliano

This book by Silvano Tagliagambe is the first volume of Studio Digitale, a new kind of editorial project that, in addressing the school and those who work there, aspires to providing conceptions and products that match up with the logics and sensibility of the open system. 

So do not expect to find linear paths proposed here and in the titles that follow, on whose intrinsic scientific goodness you will be able to rely and which will therefore be easy to put into practice to obtain positive results.  

If we were to equip ourselves to think and act in that way, we would still be trapped in a closed system, and would consequently run the risk of misunderstanding the meaning of a proposal like this one of Up schooling, that does not wish to be seen as a handbook of good, correct ideas to mechanically translate into didactic action but, on the contrary, intends to challenge that kind of culture and expectation.

Consistent with this assumption, the text I am introducing (which acts as a programmatic document for the Up School initiative described in the Preface) aspires to being a sort of medley of ideas and suggestions, each with its own specific technological-scientific-cultural substance, by means of which the teacher or educator can take steps towards rethinking the role they are called to carry out, the context in which they work and the cultural and material instruments they use. Not so much a shielded system - a list of guaranteed formulas and authors - as an open network of references where what counts is first and foremost the quality and quantity of the connections between node and node.

The objective of this book does not, of course, neglect the need to be practical; all the considerations formulated and discussed here consequently aim to give life to a school that wants to be beautiful and pleasant, yet challenging for those who work there and those who use it, apart from being good, obviously, and therefore efficient, productive and constructive, as well as democratic and transparent.  

But the aspirations and elements for action that the text refers to are never detached from a constant effort to conceptualise, nor indeed could they be, given the profile of the author, a philosopher and epistemologist.

Or, to express the idea better, the shift towards practice, to a different way of understanding practice, is shown and promoted here as the outlet of an itinerary of reconceptualisation. Hence, a complex pathway, as I shall soon explain. But in the meantime, I would like to justify my reasons for resorting to the term reconceptualization.

I use it because in spite of words that recur with a certain frequency in the text and that, by showing they belong to the semantic areas of creativity, efficacy and socialisation appear to act as elements of continuity of an educational project that has given ample proof of its worth over the past decades, not only in contexts of research into the school but also in those of political and administrative action concerning the school (in Italy, but not Italy alone), in spite, then, of this feeling of familiarity that the reader might sometimes experience, before long he will notice that most of the scientific, philosophical, technological, literary and artistic references underpinning Silvano Tagliagambe’s arguments and proposals belong to repertoires that we do not usually find employed, moreover, with such generosity, wealth, relevance and flexibility, in works destined for teachers.

The thread running through the references to current scientific events - I am thinking particularly of the examples from neuroscience brought into play, but also those taken from classical culture and presented in contemporary terms, such as the extracts from Hegel, Kierkegaard or Leopardi but also the audio or visual references to Henri Matisse or Giuseppe Verdi - serves to support the need to give body and substance not so much to an idea as to the actual idea of school. Hence the meaning of reconceptualization of which I have spoken.

I shall try to broaden the horizon within which these inspiring thoughts should be placed.

The dense, full-bodied processes underway in the world need to be acknowledged. So many changes and such obvious ones have taken place in the life of societies and cultures compared with the times in which the school model still in use, albeit in its skeletal structure, was developed: approximately two centuries have passed since the founding years of some of the most important national schools of the European continent, including of course the Italian one. The separation of the inside world of the school today from what is underway in the dynamics of the outside world is also considerable: it is of little importance whether this condition is proudly claimed as an opportunity offered to the school to positively oppose the negativity of the surrounding world, or if it is fatalistically understood as a justification for the scarceness of the results achieved; the distance is still there. The system then made plenty of progress in which choices that were motivated in the past but would today prove far less legitimate, achieved the result of being experienced as unquestionable assumptions: I am thinking, just to give one example, of the hierarchical power attributed to the different languages, the written one placed at the highest, most noble levels of scholastic action, and the audio, the visual and the operational ones situated at the edges, starting already at the first school level (and increasing as we progress upwards to the higher levels).

In short, so many and such great things have matured in the indoor and outdoor spaces of scholastic action, and so much and such great confusion as well as fusion has arisen on the various fronts of what was once called the battle of ideas, that the very idea of school seems to have evaporated in people’s minds (and, one might say, in the sciences, too, namely, in the official encounters between experts and working staff).

These days everyone has his own idea, partly because there is no-one who has not had a personal experience at school (not to mention those who found themselves repeating the experience as teachers and marginally as parents), but all the myriad individual ideas do not appear to have a common foundation at present. What is missing, in short, is the idea of school.

So even if we ignore the underlying issue, we have become used to wanting to change this institution and possibly improve its internal functioning, but without having adequate awareness of what its foundations could or should be, in the present, and therefore its actual identity as a school.

Not surprisingly, the institution’s philosophical and epistemological presuppositions are never seriously or freely discussed, similarly its educational and technological presuppositions, despite the fact that the latter date back five hundred years and the former to two hundred years ago. They are not discussed also because they have become so internalised in the common culture as to be wrongly regarded not as historical data but as natural data. Not by chance did those who tried to raise the issue in the past suffer endless censorship and curses. Yet it would be useful to bring back to mind at this moment in time the warning of de-schooling suggested nearly a half century ago by a visionary like Ivan Illich, when the claims and the very institution of school (with the myths and rituals associated with it) seem to have lost their substance and even legitimacy, at least the way they are experienced by a non-negligible share of their recipients, the students in first place.

So, if we wish to tackle the issue honestly, we need to face up to the problem of contributing to the positive re-schooling of society, beginning with the need to give concreteness not to an idea of school so much as to the idea of school that best matches the world as it is constituted and being constituted: the world, so to speak, of complexity, where no simplification (and in our doing and thinking pedagogically there are so many) incorporates the guarantee of being worth more than flatus vocis (just words).

To reconceptualise the school, achieve the idea of it and convince it of the idea, is an operation that must necessarily cope with the need to put teachers and pupils, starting with children, in direct contact with the world of complexity via concrete, intelligent procedures and solutions, open to innovation and able therefore to surprise and keep alert the actors, bringing to justice the many artificial, obsolete schematisms that continue to circulate within the institution. 

There is, then, a need for fresh oxygen, for new ways of looking at the world of learning and teaching, if we really want to give life to a contemporary school in our modern age marked by major upheavals in the collective ways of thinking, acting and living. We can no longer allow ourselves a school (or university) cut off from the world or, worse, in sterile opposition to it. Nor can we erase from our memory and consciousness what the best developments in the field of education have been proposing throughout the last century for a future active, open school. We can do this even less now that we can count on instruments like digital and network ones which, if used properly and with intelligence, enable these noble prospects to be implemented and impetus given to them.

It is within this frame of mind, therefore, that I invite those who are curious and enthusiastic about original scenarios on which to base their educational action, to lend an ear to many of the suggestions arising in this book, and in so doing, avoid reducing them to pedagogical formulas ready for use, a trap more than ever present on the horizon of so much scholastic culture bureaucratised not only in language but also in thought.

Those who find it difficult to identify with a compositional-analytical paradigm and with that conception of encaging knowledge which, by adhering to the logic of closed systems, matches textbooks with disciplines (as well as regulating knowledge); those who refuse to think of the class as a unit with absolute pedagogical validity; those who are dissatisfied with the excessive mentalism characterising the current school syllabuses (or whatever you want to call them); those who are dissatisfied with many current teaching and assessment models that by sacrificing the requirements of the body, of being active and of affectivity, both on the part of teacher and pupil, hamper the development of courses centred on interest, curiosity and sharing; those who believe that thinking by texts risks cultural suffocation if it is not put into a constructive, dialectical relationship with thinking by action, images and sounds; those, in short, who are tired of an idea of school that has long lost its original ideal force, will find here, in Tagliagambe’s book (and in the subsequent titles of the series), a vision and ideas in which, and for which, to take heart.

Preface Up

School Team

It is no coincidence that the first title in this innovative series involves the Up School curriculum (http://www.upschool.it/ideadiscuola/), for we think it contains the generally applicable prerequisites and cornerstones from which our project originated and was developed, focusing on the child and its needs, freedom of self-expression and creativity, and the mastery of various languages and language registers designed to provide the tools to actively participate in the life of the future society.

But Up School also has a history, a past that began twenty-five years ago at the will and initiative of its Head, Enrica Corbia, and from experiments carried out with La Piccola Accademia, L’Accademia dei Piccoli, all private infant schools (0-6 years old) operating in Sardinia and a shared example of innovation. During this period, our research was not limited solely to studying quality pedagogical models but, thanks to close public-private synergies, also to partnerships and collaboration in research at an international scale, and to experiments with organisational and management forms aimed at reducing costs and leading to greater accessibility by users.

Up School fits into this course as the natural continuation of established experience tending towards verticalisation of the educational path up to primary school and beyond, and the example of these good practices are a reference base for repeatable models on the territory.

After studying business administration, Alberto Melis picked up the baton passed to him by his mother, building upon past years and continuing in the wake of a complex, comprehensive construction process to define a contemporary school. The principles are binding, clear and declared. Children need balance as they grow up. Balance between body and mind, between cognition and emotions, knowledge and competences, tradition and innovation, roots and wings, between international projection and local rooting. To form complete persons, physically fit, able to think, reason, argue and decide, but also to dream and get excited, to grow up responsible and reliable. Aware that knowledge and know-how are very closely correlated qualities that need to grow hand in hand.

Since September 2015 Up School has started up primary school education.

While following ministerial syllabuses and under the private school system, the teaching project, with the expert scientific guidance of Prof. Silvano Tagliagambe, the author of this text, adopts these principles integrating them into a new educational model that takes into account the mechanisms governing our cognitive system, the most recent discoveries in neuroscience, the contribution of the new information technology and the importance of controlling the physical and psychological well-being of the students.

This entails a reorganisation of teaching processes in time and space, starting with a flexible, multi-purpose environment where groups of students join up and disperse based on their interests and competences.

Up School is structured in learning centres, laboratories subdivided into thematic areas: knowledge, skills and competences are built up, taught and enhanced by tackling problems and developing projects, and used in interaction with the others, with resources, tools and typical artefacts of all kinds of knowledge as regards the spheres of languages, mathematics, science and technology, and the socio-historical context, without neglecting ministerial programmes, but handling them with advanced, contemporary, effective teaching models.

The use of the new technologies is being increased, as useful tools for integration into daily activities. Printers and 3D screens are available in a baby-Fab lab at the School, while projectors and interactive tables are reserved for the environments for teacher-centred lessons and group work. It is not a case of replacing traditional learning tools, but of combining them with the new devices we are using in our everyday life, based on controlled but spontaneous use. To favour the sharing of information and knowledge, students need to be provided with the tools that will encourage them to inquire and compare, as well as prepare them to cope with what contemporary society will require from them in their work and everyday life. A school that does not integrate these tools into its teaching courses and does not teach their proper use and potential, is a school out of touch with the dynamics of the real world and unable to keep up with the times as dictated by the needs of its own students. Many school subjects can use the enhanced reality situation to collect and exchange information, share and discuss at a distance or simulate actions that would otherwise be impossible to carry out in a traditional school setting.

Up School fosters interactive situations that lead the student not only into individual dynamics but also social ones; the possibility to generate interactions of a different nature, albeit sometimes mediated or indirect, is essential to activate the flow of understanding of what surrounds us. An innovative school is a space that facilitates interactions and the complex processes of learning, encouraging group work and discussion.

For this reason, space design was entrusted to a team of young architects - Fabrizio Pusceddu, Lino Cabras and Silvia Farris - who, in the wake of the most important, recognised pedagogical trends, built up a child-friendly environment. A reassuring place, a villa of the early 1900s, fully restored and combining a welcoming homely feeling with the most innovative technologies and respect for the environment, thanks to the use of environmentally friendly materials. No closed classrooms but flexible learning environments, ergonomic and furnished for the various activities. A large park in the centre of the city, with spaces for physical activity, and an indoor swimming pool at the service of students.

"I used to play in great earnest, and somewhere along the line they called my play art" said Maria Lai, the important local artist who died recently.

Creativity, artistic action, games, all have rules that must be taught, learnt and metabolised, so that they become an educational process tending towards the development of personal awareness of the world, opinions that will mature over time thanks to observing what others have done and to the will to express oneself by doing, creating, remaking. Managing one’s emotions, knowing how to interpret and understand them, letting them flow consciously into the creative act.

At Up School specialist teachers guide the creative and artistic efforts of the children in equipped laboratories, experimenting with different techniques and approaches based on shared themes tending towards understanding reality and towards the events of everyday life.

The psychological and physical well-being of Up School’s young pupils is the first target on which the programme for the day’s teaching is focused. The ability to think is a quality strongly linked with the sense and control of the body, and with the chance to seize the opportunities the spatial context offers us in terms of opportunities for action. Play, sport and, more generally, physical activity, are key factors for the functional development of the associative areas of the cerebral cortex and favour the development of the nervous system in every way. Body