The Contribution of the Ceméa Movement to Teaching Innovation in Italian School (1960-1980)

The Ceméa movement (Centre d'Entraînement aux Méthodes d'Éducation Active) [Training Centres on Methods of Progressive Education] was founded in France in 1937 by Gisèle de Failly, with the aim of spreading the principles of progressive education through multi-day residential stages addressed to educators, free-time animators and teachers. De Failly's initiative, who was closely familiar with the Scout experience, thework of Celéstin Freinet and the Montessori method (De Failly, 1976; Freinet, 1981), was part of the panorama of intense exchanges between educational theorists and practitioners – particularly fruitful in the early 20th century – whose common horizon was the idea of learning basedon hands-on experience, in which the child's interests and sensitivities constitute the core element of every educational pathway (Guisset,2009). In the post-war period, the Ceméa, whose stages attracted an increasing number of participants, gradually spread outside France: they arrived in Italy in 1950, a few years after the fall of the fascist regime. The appearance of the Ceméa in the peninsula was connected to the pedagogical debate of those years, aimed at an innovation of the whole educational system in a democratic direction: one of the main points of reference was the group that developed around the Scuola-Città Pestalozzi, an innovative reality inspired by Dewey's school-laboratory, founded in 1945 by Ernesto Codignola (Cambi, 1982) and inspired by Dewey's school-laboratory (2007). Codignola, who would later also hold the position of vice-president of the Féderation Internationale des Ceméa , was in close contact with key figures in the pedagogy of the time, such as the aforementioned Freinet, Henri Laborde and De Failly herself, and established an important link with the Centro Italo-Svizzero in Rimini directed by Margherita Zoebeli (Trentanove, 2012). The Italian Ceméa, through its local delegations – each characterised by its own marked identity –, beyond organising training courses on music, dance, painting and theatre as Progressive education techniques, held study days on methodological and didactic issues, as well as “seminari di discussione” [discussion seminars] on topics concerning teaching in compulsory schools; in the 1960s Ceméa, together with the Educational Cooperation Movement directly inspired by Freinet's work, was the associations most followed by innovation-oriented teachers. As emerges from the publications, information bulletins and still unpublished class journals examined, as well as from the analysis of the interviews with former teachers who trained and collaborated with Ceméa, the experience with De Failly's movement triggered in those who approached it– often through summer work in the holiday camps run by the movement – a process of change in everyday school work; teaching becamemore open to a multiplicity of languages (for example music, theatre) and to the contact with the natural environment – object of a direct study with pupils –, oriented towards the protagonism of the child and the sharing of ideas and experiences among colleagues (Clementi, 1960).