The Pedagogy of Listening: the Italian Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa and a transdisciplinary early childhood educational approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT After the Second World War, the Italian educational context in Italy was distinguished by a network of different democratic and antiauthoritarian pedagogical ideas and educational experiences, developed as heterogeneous forms of New Education. The Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa (MCE), inspired by Freinet’s popular pedagogy and cooperative techniques, underwent transformative and contradictory processes. In particular, the paper is focused on a transdisciplinary educational approach developed within the MCE and applied in preschool (scuola d’infanzia). By using oral and written sources (interviews, publications, MCE bulletins, archives), the paper intends to trace the main elements that shaped the Pedagogy of Listening, developed in Rome at the end of the 70s by Alessandra Ginzburg, and experimented with by many MCE teachers. The Pedagogy of Listening combined Freinet’s techniques with the Lacanian listening posture and the bi-logic elaborated by Matte Blanco, aiming to legitimate children as a specific cultural group deserving respect and recognition. The paper addresses the conditions that allowed the Pedagogy of Listening to emerge within the Italian movement, original tools and techniques that were produced concerning preschool education and the ways in which the Pedagogy of Listening evolved over time, being translated and further transformed within nurseries, primary and middle schools.