Maria Montessori: Uma Pedagoga que Atravessa Fronteiras

This essay describes the Montessori's biography and work, focusing on the international spread of the method. The first part presents the family and school experience of Maria Montessori, who was born in 1870 and moved to Rome at the age of five. It explores her entry into the Faculty of Medicine, as the only woman in her class and therefore the target of gender prejudice. As an academic, she was interested in social causes of health problems and, soon after graduating, she began treating and training children with disabilities. The other part seeks to understand Maria Montessori's intense public life as an activist in defence of women's political and social rights, and especially as the formulator of an innovative teaching method. The founding institution of this new pedagogical proposal was the Casa dei Bambini, established in 1907 in a socially vulnerable neighbourhood in Rome, which offered specific teaching materials for children to learn independently In this way, the Montessori method became part of the New Education movement, which was emerging at the beginning of the 20th century and had various pedagogical matrices, including those of John Dewey and Ovid Decroly. The pioneering Casa dei Bambini attracted the immediate attention of Italian and foreign educators so that the Montessori method spread to Italy and other countries, especially the USA, Spain, Holland and India. The transnational circulation of the Montessori method was fuelled by the translation of books and articles, by the author's visits and stays in various countries, as well as by the pilgrimage of educators to Italy to visit the Case dei Bambini and take part in international congresses on this pedagogical proposal.