On Saturday 19th November 2022, the Auditorium of M9 – Museum of the 20th century hosted the final event of the Dream Project, which involved 15 primary school teachers from different areas of Italy.
To sum up an international project that lasted 24 months and in which we took part with other museum partners, we must leave the floor to some of the teachers – who, in the front line with their students, got involved with enthusiasm and creativity.
The word goes to teacher Cristina Spessotto who used the word finally to define the Dream Project:
Finally a project that deals with the school and the museum and puts them on the same level as one the mutual extension of the other.
Finally a project that breaks out of the box and allows pupils to bring their own contribution within a path that puts them at the centre of an active learning process.
Finally a project that brings theatricality, playfulness, and fun into a place that is usually associated with an aura of monumentality, severity, distance, and institutionality.
Dream is a project that offers the place and time to become curious, to broaden the range of mental images of reality, to grasp details of it that are inaccessible elsewhere.
“The educational intervention that I brought to M9,” explains Spessotto, “emphasised the intentionality of knowing: that is, to highlight how those who ask questions, those who are intrigued by a piece of reality are also pushed to ask themselves how they can learn more; they want to search with intelligence and creativity a way to answer the questions they have asked themselves”.
The school of the future requires a profound reflection on the ways of doing school. The need to pursue indispensable knowledge in a time of wide availability of knowledge, the need to rediscover the value of collaboration and cohesion between people, the urgency of ensuring the inclusion and participation of all, are factors that Dream has perfectly encompassed, to better define the perimeter of the educational proposal that schools and museums can offer in synergy.
Even in the words of the teacher Eliana Vecchiato, it is clear that the DREAM Project was certainly an innovative proposal from the didactic point of view, enabling interdisciplinary learning using transversal skills. It created an opportunity to discover the possibility of ‘experiencing’ the museum through an active approach.
“I found it stimulating and at the same time anxiety-provoking precisely because it was new, all to be built and invented. It allowed great freedom to range widely and to build step by step, transforming and forging the initial idea…a bit like sartorial work. This project was a challenge for me. To embark on such an ambitious and innovative project as to have no background from which to draw not only ideas, but also certainty in the course to be followed, put me in a bit of a crisis and at the same time simultaneously also gave me the drive that sets in motion the part that
I love the most in my profession lately. Setting off and having the road open to something unique, not because it is extraordinary, but because it is the result of research work, getting the ideas from my pupils. Ideas that are inside them that they are not fully aware of, but which are just waiting to be brought out”.
It is clear from the words of Spessotto, Vecchiato and Fornelli that there is a need to promote profound innovation in the didactics of everyday schooling.
An innovation that strongly hinges on pursuing the quality of teaching through new methods, on creating pathways that offer the opportunity to learn in an autonomous and conscious manner, on insisting on procedural and imaginative knowledge that respectively develop multiple methodologies for accessing knowledge and its creative transfer, and on encouraging processes of autonomous research and organisation of knowledge so that pupils learn to learn.
This is what Dream has represented and represents for these teachers: a dream come true that promotes active citizenship experiences, which empower pupils to participate in community life, taking care of the common good.
Eliana Vecchiato, S.G. Bosco – Salzano, (VE)
Cristina Spessotto, Ippolito Nievo – San Donà di Piave (VE)
Conny Fornelli, IC Vittorio Veneto 2 – (TV)
