scholarly journals Teacher’s training in the Montessori Approach: the debate on the pages of La Coltura Popolare (1911-1922)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-71
Author(s):  
Martino Negri ◽  
Gabriella Seveso

In the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, reflections on teacher training were particularly rich, implying the lively and significant participation of a plurality of actors. Even Maria Montessori actively participated in this debate and the meeting with the Humanitarian Society in Milan, and with Augusto Osimo primarily, proved to be very fruitful on these issues. The specialist magazine La Coltura Popolare represents a faithful and interesting mirror of this relationship and of the many reflections and initiatives arose from it, promoting the propagation of the Montessori method and offering at the same time a space for dialogue and comparison of all the most innovative and vivifying voices of the pedagogical reflection of the time. This paper proposes a first and partial reconstruction of the significant role that La Coltura Popolare played, from 1911 to 1922, in soliciting the attention of its public on the topic of teacher training, in spreading the Montessori method, in stimulating a not biased and preconceived comparison between different approaches, experiments and views on childhood.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Rossella Raimondo

The fascination with the Montessori Method stems from a never quite exhaustive analysis of her studies, which, due to the multiplicity and complexity of its elements, continually lend themselves to readings, hermeneutic interpretations and discoveries. Following a series of “clues” that see the figure of Maria Montessori intertwined with that of Anna Freud, this article intends to enhance the interdisciplinary interweaving and the multiple links which, by relating pedagogy with psychoanalysis, favor a broader vision of the implications relating to the changes occurring during the first half of the twentieth century, in which the child is the protagonist.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-22
Author(s):  
Mariangela Scarpini

This paper aims to focus on certain aspects of two education methods: one initiated in the first half of the twentieth century by Maria Montessori, and the other in the second half of that century by Matthew Lipman. The aim – neither comparative nor analytical – is to shed light on the connections and, more specifically, the elements of the Montessori Method that reflect on Lipman’s proposal. The question this paper aims to answer is: can P4C find fertile ground in schools applying the Montessori Method? The paper will focus, among other elements: on the importance to give space to thinking experience from childhood and on the recognition of the value of childhood. Both Lipman and Montessori have systematically observed children of different ages – the former in the first half, the latter in the second half of the twentieth century. Both characterized, gave value, and focused their scientific contributions on children’s ability to think and express their thoughts through languages (purposely in the plural form). As educational researchers and professionals know, children have the ability to think, but such ability has not always been (still isn’t) considered to exist. Even when it is evoked in words, educational choices and proposals seem – still today – to express mistrust towards children’s thought. The two mentioned authors have repeatedly highlighted the importance of an essential right: the right to think and to be given a space – even as children – to exercise thinking with others. In particular, both authors – though envisaging different educational paths – identified the same categories functional to exercising thinking. Their interconnection may guide the actions of teachers, educators, and learning process experts. In fact, P4C might play a role in educational contexts in which the class is already considered a community of inquiry, in which the teacher is assigned the same role as a facilitator


Author(s):  
Michael O’Toole

In this article I examine aspects of the relationship between mothers and sons from an attachment perspective in an Irish context. Through the works of Irish writers such as Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, and Colm Tóibín, I focus on particular aspects of this relationship, which fails to support the developmental processes of separation and individuation in the many men who come to me for psychotherapy. I illustrate key points concerning this attachment dynamic through the use of clinical examples of my work with two men from my practice. While acknowledging that many other cultural factors play a significant role in the emotional development of children, integrating the work of our poets, novelists, and scholars with an attachment perspective


Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.


Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042096992
Author(s):  
Huasha Zhang

This article analyzes the transformation of Lhasa’s Chinese community from the embodiment of an expansionist power in the early eighteenth century to the orphan of a fallen regime after the Qing Empire’s demise in 1911. Throughout the imperial era, this remote Chinese enclave represented Qing authority in Tibet and remained under the metropole’s strong political and social influence. Its members intermarried with the locals and adopted many Tibetan cultural traits. During the years surrounding the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, this community played a significant role in a series of interconnected political and ethnic confrontations that gave birth to the two antagonistic national bodies of Tibet and China. The community’s history and experiences challenge not only the academic assessment that Tibet’s Chinese population had fully assimilated into Tibetan society by the twentieth century but also the widespread image of pre-1951 Lhasa as a harmonious town of peaceful ethnic coexistence.


Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Griffin

In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of ‘breaking through’, as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini’s secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the ‘hundred years since the foundation of Fascism’? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Erin Keenan

<p>Māori urbanisation and urban migrations have been the subject of much discussion and research, especially following World War Two when Māori individuals, whānau and communities increasingly became residents of towns and cities that were overwhelmingly Pākehā populated. However, Māori urbanisation experiences and urban migrations are difficult topics to address because kaumātua are reluctant to discuss ‘urban Māori’, especially considering its implications for Māori identities. The original contribution this thesis makes to histories of Māori urban migrations is that it explores these and other understandings of urbanisations to discover some of their historical influences. By discussing urbanisations directly with kaumātua and exploring historical sources of Māori living in, and moving to, the urban spaces of Wellington and the Hutt Valley through the twentieth century, this thesis is a ‘meeting place’ for a range of perspectives on the meanings of urbanisations from the past and the present. Although urbanisation was an incredible time of material change for the individuals and whānau who chose to move into cities such as Wellington, the histories of urban migration experiences exist within a scope of Māori and iwi worldviews that gave rise to multiple experiences and understandings of urbanisations. The Wellington region is used to show that Māori in towns and cities used Māori social and cultural forms in urban areas so that they could, through the many challenges of becoming urban-dwelling, ensure the persistence of their Māoritanga. Urbanisations also allowed Māori to both use traditional identities in urban areas, as well as develop new relationships modelled on kinship. The Ngāti Pōneke community is used as an example of the complex interactions between these identities and how many Māori became active residents in but not conceptually ‘of’ cities. As a result, the multiple and layered Māori identities that permeate throughout Māori experiences of the present and the past are important considerations in approaching and discussing urbanisations. Urban Māori communities have emphasised the significance of varied and layered Māori identities, and this became particularly pronounced through the Māori urban migrations of the twentieth century.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Retief Muller

The role of the Dutch Reformed Church’s mission policies in the development of apartheid ideology has in recent times come under increased scrutiny. In terms of the formulation of missionary theory within the DRC, the controversial figure of Johannes du Plessis played a significant role in the early twentieth century. In addition to his work as a mission theorist, Du Plessis was a biblical scholar at Stellenbosch University who was found guilty of heresy by his church body, despite having much support from the rank and file membership. This article asks questions regarding the ways in which his memory and legacy are often evaluated from the twin, yet opposing perspectives of sacralisation and vilification. It also considers the wider intellectual influences on Du Plessis such as the missiology of the German theologian, Gustav Warneck. Du Plessis’s missionary theory helped to lay the groundwork for the later development of apartheid ideology, but perhaps in spite of himself, he also introduced a subverting discourse into Dutch Reformed theology. Some of the incidental consequences of this discourse, particularly in relation to the emerging theme of indigenous knowledge, are furthermore assessed here.


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