Studi sulla Formazione/Open Journal of Education
ISSN 2036-6981 (online) Founded in 1998,"Studi sulla Formazione" aimed at those in the academic world who are dedicated to advancing the field of education through their research. "Studi sulla Formazione" provides a range of articles that speak to the major issues in education across all content areas and disciplines. The journal is published two times per year and edited through a rigorous double blind review process that utilizes a national and international editorial board and peer reviewers. SSF promotes to advance research in the field of education through a collection of quality, relevant, and advanced interdisciplinary articles. Scientific Direction - Editor-in-Chief: Alessandro Mariani, University of Florence, Italy Studi sulla Formazione is indexed in: Call for Papers Philosophy of education One of the specializations of philosophy is connected to the education of homo sapiens in his wealth of humanity and personal and social, or rather to the philosophy of education that already in the ancient world had brilliant interpreters and then gradually gave life to very noble models, arriving up to today: in a historical time that for various reasons puts back at the center, precisely, the problem of education to give life to an increasingly fully human civilization. The dossier of the second edition of the journal “Studi sulla Formazione” in 2025 will develop this topic. We welcome contributions by Italian and foreign scholars, ware interested in the topic. The academic authors should communicate the title and the short abstract of the article and should send the final article (about 6.000-15.000 characters, spaces included) by September, 30th 2025 . For further details please visit our CALL FOR PAPERS page. Download the full call for paper in pdf (ita – eng)
Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Intervento sulle Indicazioni Nazionali 2025 del Ministero di Istruzione e Merito: tenuto a Firenze il 24.5.2025
Copyright (c) 2025 Franco Cambi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 La Redazione https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 La Direzione https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Itinerari del metodo normale: una ricerca in divenire
The introductory essay illustrates the reasons of a dossier dedicated to the origins and development of a series of didactic practices related to the origins of educational institutions and systems which have made the history of elementary school (and more) in Europe since the 18th century. The “normal method” and the related schools are extremely important not only for a history of teaching practices, handbooks and texts useful for the training of students and teachers, but also for a history of school and educational institutions which can be reconstructed through case studies capable of highlighting the relations of specific events and contextual issues with broader areas and educational systems at an international level.
Copyright (c) 2025 Monica Ferrari, Maurizio Piseri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Per una storia delle pratiche didattiche in prospettiva europea: il caso del “metodo normale”
The “normal method”, as it has been defined in its making, is a very interesting issue for those eager to study, in a diachronic and comparative way at a European level, some aspects of educational and didactic practices in relation to the development of educational institutions and their “communities of practice”. Starting from the example of the “normal method”, analyzed also thanks to dictionaries and studies that have influenced the pedagogical debate in the contemporary age, this essay emphasizes the need to conduct case studies capable of reconstructing particular aspects of a cultural history that has contributed to organize specific didactic and institutional patterns in Europe.
Copyright (c) 2025 Monica Ferrari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Il metodo normale tra Prussia e Austria nel XVIII secolo
The article traces the origins of the normal method from Halle and Berlin to Sagan and then to Vienna, highlighting its Protestant matrix while also emphasizing the consistency with which Johann Felbiger applied it, adapting it to a Catholic population, for both elementary and catechetical teaching. Felbiger’s cultural endeavor was part of the Catholic Enlightenment and the Theresian policy of religious and educational reform, which must be examined together. The adoption of a new didactic approach not only introduced innovative and effective tools for classroom control – many of which are still in use today – but also accelerated learning and facilitated the transmission of moral and religious content more effectively. The control of education, as mandated by the Theresian law of 1774, was instrumental to the jurisdictionalist project of rationalization, centralization, and strengthening of state structures, which relied on the support of religious personnel, though subordinated to state control. The emergence of modern schooling took place within both a pedagogical and religious framework, shaping both educational and political thought.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simonetta Polenghi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Le riforme scolastiche in Tirolo fino al XVIII secolo, con una particolare attenzione all’implementazione del metodo normale
The essay illustrates the school reforms in Tyrol up to the 18th century with particular attention to the implementation of the normal method, which is a real challenge from the methodological and cultural point of view in relation to a particular context. The following pages summarize the emergence of the school system and school instruction from the Middle Age to the introduction of the normal method – Normalmethode – which was born in a general context capable of reconstructing the school system in the 17th century. The geographic focus of the study is the German-speaking territory of the County of Tyrol – nowadays the area of the Italian province of Bolzano-Alto Adige and the Austrian region of Tyrol.
Copyright (c) 2025 Annemarie Augshöll Blasbichler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La riforma scolastica in Lombardia tra XVIII e XIX secolo
The foundation of the public primary school system of Austrian Lombardy involved two steps: the 1775 reform and the 1786 reform. Recent studies have underlined the continuity in the proceeding of the two reforms. In this way it is possible to circumscribe the breaking points to merely didactic and administrative aspects. Based on the uniformity of didactics, the normal method required a net of school inspectors to monitor the activity of the schools as well as the creation of training courses for the education of teachers. Even though the normal method had been deeply reformed in Austria after 1780, it was rigorously applied in its orthodox version in the Lombard schools until 1791. From 1791 the method was revised, just like in Vienna ten years before, under pressure from politicians, intellectuals and the families themselves. The two steps of the path of the normal schools in Lombardy reflect the position of the two main protagonists in the Lombard school system: Wolfgang Moritz, a supporter of the Felbiger’s method, and Giovanni Bovara, the mind behind the 1775 reform and a critic of the new didactics in relation to those parts perceived as mechanical and mnemonic.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maurizio Piseri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Isidoro Bianchi: mitologia borealista, cultura massonico-illuministica e metodo normale
Camaldolese Cremonese monk Isidoro Bianchi (1735-1808) was an important figure of Lombard culture in the second half of the 18th century. His adherence to the Masonic viewpoint, especially that of “English” ancestry, matured during his stay in the Kingdom of Naples, between 1769 and 1773, while his admiration for the countries of Northern Europe took shape mainly during his stay in Copenhagen, between 1774 and 1776. These experiences conditioned Bianchi's culture, and later, upon his return to Lombardy, he became a theorist and promoter of the normal method.
Copyright (c) 2025 Filippo Sani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Former tout en contrôlant: divergences sur le modèle des écoles normales primaires et secondaires dans la France du premier tiers du XIXe siècle
In the first third of the 19th century, the memory of the Revolution helped to politicise the issue of teacher training. The ultra-royalists, who wanted submissive teachers, rejected the model of teacher training colleges, which they felt would produce dissenters, in favour of on-the-job training. Some Liberals also rejected the normal school model for primary education, seeing it as a risk of indoctrination by the State, but the Conservative Liberals ended up supporting it, with the aim of raising the level of qualification of teachers while shaping their behaviour. As far as the training of secondary school teachers was concerned, the failure of the écoles normales partielles académiques, which had led to disparities in standards, contributed to the fact that the École normale supérieure was not replicated in the provinces; its essentially scientific aim explains the discredit and rapid closure of the attempt to set up a secondary teacher training college in Aix in 1848.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yves Verneuil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Il prefetto Adrien de Lezay-Marnésia e la scuola normale di Strasburgo del 1810
The pedagogical experiences that took place in the years of the French Revolution laid the foundations for the creation of new educational institutions with the aim of training a generation of teachers prepared and attentive to new teaching methods. In 1810, thanks to the initiative of the prefect Adrien de Lezay-Marnésia, an upholder of the dignity of the civil service and a catalyst for Austro-German pedagogical innovations, the normal school of Strasbourg came to life. From the Rhine border, this became the model for subsequent foundations in the Kingdom of France.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simona Negruzzo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
L’esportazione del metodo normale in Sardegna (1826-1844)
How did the transfer of the Metodo Normale, employed in the model school of Milan in the first quarter of the 19th century, take place in Sardinian elementary schools? The correspondence between Francesco Cherubini, who was deeply committed to the translation of the Metodo Normale in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, and the Sardinian priest Antonio Manunta, who had the opportunity to experiment with the application of the simultaneous method during an internship in Brera, illustrates the expectations that the new system aroused on the island and accounts for the dissatisfaction stemming from its initial practical implementation. The migration of new teaching practices from Central Europe to Southern Italy also serves as an opportunity to examine the hopes and disillusionments arising from educational reforms that were carried out without a profound transformation in the training of teachers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fabio Pruneri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
L’approdo del metodo normale nella formazione del maestro italiano
This essay retraces the last stage in the articulated history of the normal method, after the Pietist, the Habsburg Chamberlain and the French revolutionary seasons. In Restoration Italy, “normal” is no more than a synonym for method (for good method), without further specification, so much so that “normal” or “method” schools are called the schools for the teachers training, on which Piedmont, for example, would focus from 1840 onwards. This is the starting point for the so-called Piedmontese Methodical Movement, inspired by the lesson of Ferrante Aporti and made up of politicians and schoolmen such as Giovanni Antonio Rayneri, Domenico Berti, Vincenzo Troya, Carlo Boncompagni, Vincenzo Gerelli and Agostino Fecia, whose ideas would inspire teacher training in united Italy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Matteo Morandi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Polarizzazioni antinomiche su IA e digitale: il ruolo della pedagogia
In an era marked by the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of digital life forms increasingly integrated into human everyday life, this contribution aims to outline a pedagogical phenomenology of being onlife. Starting from a critical-hermeneutic stance, the present reflection advocates the abandonment of an antinomic paradigm – one inherently shaped by the logic of opposition, the versus – in favor of an educational framework conceived to enact a maieutic and generative role.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gennaro Balzano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Il saggio consiste nello studio e nell'analisi dei fenomeni politici e culturali, da un lato, e dei fenomeni educativi e antropologici, dall'altro, che hanno portato a fare del grande disegno ideologico di Giovanni Gentile una sorta di categoria universale dell'educazione, qualcosa che rassomiglia a un vero e proprio archetipo educativo. Questo si è affermato generalmente in Europa e particolarmente in Italia come un' "era" precipua che ha contraddistinto la formazione delle Nazioni. Era educativa che, prendendo le mosse dall'illuminismo romantico, attraversando tutta la storia contemporanea e lo sviluppo delle società capitalistiche e di massa, dura e si rafforza fino ai nostri giorni grazie alla rivoluzione informatica e digitale e alla arricchita viralità dei memi.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gaetano Bonetta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Collodi educatore dell’Italia unita: tra scuola e cittadinanza
The essay focuses on the last part of Collodi's life and pedagogical work: this part was aimed at promoting the school system of unified Italy, indicating its task of shaping a new citizenship and spreading it through schools. According to Collodi, however, this action must always be accompanied by a critical and ironic attitude, which leaves room for a spirit of adventure in the education of young people. He therefore argues for the need to educate citizens with a strong ethical conscience but who are at the same time free and critical, through a democratic and liberal ethos, which Collodi had already defined as early as 1848.
Formarsi con la poesia di tre poeti: Pascoli, Saba, Montale
Pascoli, Montale and Saba are three poets capable of offering important lessons and proposing significant values, both in a human and poetic sense. The voices of these three authors are diverse and original, and their poems offer meaningful reflections on various ideal and lived experiences: they explore the very value of life, reinterpreting it with exquisite personal and human sensitivity. These are therefore three poetic voices that should be read and reread, precisely to enrich each person's awareness of themselves and of life itself.
This article explores the intersection between activism, civic engagement, and the onlife dimension, a framework that conceptualizes the inseparability of online and offline experiences. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with 20 young activists with migrant background (11 males and 9 females aged between 20 and 31 years), this research investigates the ways in which anti-racist and intersectional practices are shaped and amplified by digital media in Italy. The findings highlight the obsolescence of the online-offline dichotomy, demonstrating how digital technologies are seamlessly embedded in activism and everyday life. Participants recognize the dual role of digital media: as a powerful tool for mobilization and awareness but also as a space where hate speech and harmful stereotypes are propagated. The study underscores the urgent need for educational interventions rooted in media education, critical thinking, and intercultural perspectives. Such approaches can equip younger generations with the tools to counteract online hate speech, foster inclusivity, and leverage the onlife dimension for positive social change. This article ultimately calls for reimagining education as a transformative space where the digital and physical converge to promote active, inclusive citizenship.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tiziana Chiappelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Verso nuove Indicazioni nazionali? Un'analisi pedagogica e didattica di quelle attuali
The National Guidelines for Preschool and First Cycle Education of 2012 attempt to respond to the complexity of the educational challenges of the new century. They are influenced by the thought of E. Morin while on the didactic level the presence of J. Dewey is felt. Pedagogy of complexity, active and inclusive teaching are therefore the foundations on which the entire structure of the Guidelines is based and which make them still extremely current.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giuliano Franceschini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La Teoria Critica francofortese (1922-1933)
The article examines the Frankfurt School (firstly investigating its Jewish-German origin) and the Kritische Theorie elaborated therein: a theory of society that uses Hegel, Marx, and, in part, Freud to develop a radical critique of bourgeois society, capitalist ideology, National Socialism, and the culture industry. Of this School — here considered as the most unusual and original among the schools of thought in early twentieth-century German philosophy — the essay investigates the period ranging from its foundation to the escape of its members from Hitlerian Germany.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mario Gennari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La “letteratura dal basso”. Il caso di Alberto Manzi, maestro scrittore
Starting from the early 1950s, a literary trend developed in conjunction with the first attempts to renew teaching models, promoted above all by the MCE, which involved some teachers as authors, mostly elementary school teachers, who became witnesses of the narrative experiences of children and young people directly involved in the development of stories within school structures. These were often experiences conducted in marginal places during the years of post-war reconstruction, where the school became an outpost in the process of emancipation and democratization of the masses starting from the social practices that took place in the classroom. Alberto Manzi was among the first to conduct a collective writing experiment in the classroom; there were then numerous militant teachers who chose, in difficult and deprived contexts, to favor the path of storytelling and dialogue to start a process of knowledge and literacy that was not only instrumental, but also civil and imaginary. In the happiest cases, a children’s literature is born that develops “from below” and that is able to intersect the experiential and inventive paths of the recipients while at the same time ensuring high aesthetic standards, since the texts produced do not operate towards a “child-friendly” simplification, but rather towards the elevation of a literary expression capable of effectively intercepting reality and giving rise to creative representation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Chiara Lepri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Il “diritto di nominazione”. Un nuovo diritto per i bambini e le bambine nelle scuole italiane
The main topics of this article were discussed in the “Congreso Internacional de Educación y Diversidad” held in April 2025 at the Universidad de Zaragoza, in Spain. During the conference, we were invited to give a speech on El derecho de nomination. Un nuevo derecho de los niños y las niñas en las escuelas italianas. Here, we resume and develop that report, examining in depth in the first part, written by Emiliano Macinai, the theoretical assumptions and the framework that forms the background to the topic; and in the second part, written by Marianna Piccioli, the analysis of the results of a research conducted in the previous months.
Copyright (c) 2025 Emiliano Macinai, Marianna Piccioli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Per una formazione aperta alla creatività e alla vita.
The current complexity generates a widespread socio-existential disorientation, which becomes timor vivendi for some people. To face this fluidity, a school connected to life should strongly develop in current students creativity, autonomous, flexible and divergent mental habitus, which requires an inclusive classroom environment, one that self-educates, and points to emotional well-being and self-esteem. This brief excursus, which looks from the classical to the present time, moves along this trajectory.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandra Mazzei https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
L’esperienza pionieristica dell’Istituto delle Sordomute Povere di Bologna per l’educazione della sordità
Thanks to the use of previously unpublished sources, this research examines the IstitutoSordomute Povere di Bologna, which celebrates its one hundred and seventy-ninth birthday this year, to analyse about its management and organisational aspects, as well as its pedagogical and didactic issues. By retracing the traces of its history, preserved in its archives, it is possible to put in evidence the socio-educational farsightedness with which it was conceived a structure that was able to mark a very important turning point in the Bolognese territory, introducing methods and approaches aimed at providing education, instruction and religious training to young deaf girls belonging to poor families from 6 to 14 years of age, saving them from social isolation, illiteracy and the dangers inherent in their destitute condition.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rossella Raimondo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Il tema della mostruosità in J.R.R. Tolkien
The literary Twentieth Century was marked by a global cultural phenomenon called Fantasy. The progenitor of this narrative vein was undoubtedly John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In some of his academic essays, he carried out a real meta-narrative reflection about the relationship between Fantasy, Imagination and Fairy-stories. Through reflections on Fantastic Ethics and Narrative Pedagogy, this essay aims to deepen the theme of monstrosity in relation to some fundamental figures present in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ivano Sassanelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article examines the cognitive process underlying understanding in the educational environment, starting from a neo-cognitivist assumption of Gardnerian inspiration, according to which such a process, in disagreement with a now anachronistic passive vision of the mind (all behaviourist), produces an important inner transformation: understanding (both of the teacher and the student) involves specific, as well as complex theoretical-operational and strategic-methodological dynamisms adopted during didactic communication, such that a cognitive leap of knowledge can be made in view of the realization of a metacognitive process. For this reason, we hope for a reform of thought (Morin) that proposes a new and different conception of what can be called knowledge far from an undifferentiated accumulation of information devoid of any organic and functional location, to didactically build a well-made head instead of a well-filled head, generated by a motivation to know that represents the expression of quality factors within the training process and that is intrinsic, because it derives from the pleasure of carrying out cognitive activities capable of involving the individual as a whole.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberto Travaglini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
L'infanzia di fronte all'abisso della ragione
Abstract in italiano. In questo articolo intendo contribuire al dibattito tra entusiasti e detrattori circa la capacità dei bambini di svolgere ragionamenti filosofici. Prendendo spunto dall'approccio adottato da Gareth Matthews, in questo articolo offro un'analisi ravvicinata di un dialogo filosofico (condotto secondo la didattica della comunità di ricerca al cuore della Philosophy for Children) fra bambini di 8-9 anni e sostengo che in esso emergono alcuni dei tratti distintivi del filosofare. Abstract in english. In this paper I intend to contribute to the debate between enthusiasts and detractors about children’s ability to carry out philosophical reasoning. Drawing on the approach adopted by Gareth Matthews, in this paper I offer a close analysis of a philosophical dialogue (conducted according to the didactics of the community of inquiry at the heart of Philosophy for Children) between 8-9 year old children and argue that some of the distinctive features of philosophizing emerge in it.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luca Zanetti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0