The genesis of the project
A few years ago, in the millennium, we were - historians and sociologists of the geo-historical Laboratory Present Time , together with a first core of the Comprehensive teachers' Galilei "- to reflect on the meaning of urban transition that was investing Reggio Emilia, in particular, what we like to call his "northern border".
The discussion stemmed from a number of questions specific to a school that we continue to conceive of a place - the kitchen and blacksmith - citizenship: how to do it, we wondered, for appaesare students to an environment of rapid change?
The geo-historical approach seemed to us to provide some good response. It combines a conceptual Time and Space, then pursue a teaching interdisciplinary open to empirical testing, placing it in a particular geo-historical space-time.
There he started a fruitful relationship of mutual cooperation for many years with the District 7 of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia.
A teaching of citizenship
It can be said that this project has been defined after the first sketch on paper, in the midst of several "campaigns" aimed at building educational guidance courses on historical and cultural territory.
The educational and training objectives of the project are to:
- Enhancing the area and being able to recognize
- Strengthening the sense of identity and belonging (or membership)
- To promote a knowledge infra-generational
- Facilitate the exchange between the diversity of subjects and cultures
- Increasing activities of hospitality
- To become active participants in knowledge paths
- To exploit the wealth of knowledge and values participatory
- Documenting the experience
An important aim is therefore to translate operationally teaching of geo-history in a constant comparison of experiences of field work between school and territory.
The geo-disciplinary curriculum is at the heart of the historic design innovative teaching that networks offer education and training of institutional and social actors in the local reality.
The routes educational workshops for the pupils they have translated into an action-research and in the territory, able to question the collective memories of men and women who live or will live, the places of historical memory, transformation and permanence .
The intent is to offer students the opportunity to be subject-actors of their time in the affirmative or critical understanding of this. In parallel, the training is aimed at teachers: the training courses, the seminaries, to field trips and to compare different experiences the goal is always to favor active skills, shared and transferred in a highly interdisciplinary perspective.
The territory as a place of "here and now" offers teachers and students from the possibility of significant images and, hence, to travel and experience combining knowledge and fostering the "living knowledge" in a constant emotional and social literacy. Through the project "Educate Place ', the school takes an active, aware and responsible in building a culture of participatory citizenship and knowledge of the area.
Appaesarsi in the present tense
Educate City has among its objectives to foster a strong anchor to the territory in a perspective inclusive of different affiliations to promote social cohesion in both the "local company" is the "community" in which we re-known.
This is particularly true for the territorial reality of the District 7: crossroads powerful space-time in the changes and transformations meets the coexistence of urban areas, industrial devices and countryman. Areas for over a century have been interested in migration, more or less continuous, but always with a strong impact on social reality and the community in the process of identity construction mutually re-known and shared.
The project educates the sense of place is also to go to the construction of an idea of belonging and citizenship is not just cultural, but it has to do with the subjective identity.
The narration and re-telling of the place, this time in multi-cultural and multi-space, becomes one of the keys to open doors inside the trans-generational story of men and women, with a "synchronic lens" that puts us directly in relation with the future through the past and living in the present.
