Antonio Valleriani and pedagogical narrativity in the Educational Circle of Teramo. Historical and theoretical balance

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer a historical presentation and a reading of the pedagogical and theoretical work carried out more than forty years ago by the Italian teacher and professor Antonio Valleriani and a group of collaborating teachers in the Abruzzo region of Italy. The common thread inspiring his proposal and his educational practice in the primary schools of the V Circolo di Teramo, of which he was director, was the hermeneutic-narrative philosophy. In contrast to the more theoretical orientations whose practice was subsequently attempted, the great value of this educational experience has to do with the fact that it arose, from its very beginning, from specific work in the classroom. This circularity between classroom practice and philosophical reflection resulted in a series of fundamental pillars that give body to the proposal, among which we could highlight the convenience of complementing the delimitations of the concept with the metaphorical informality of rhetoric; the possibilities of narrativity and aesthetic receptivity for elaborating learning processes and the constitution of identity; the consideration of childhood as a scenario where truth happens in each case; the open profile of the hermeneutic teacher inspired by the hybrid implications of identity; and the need to turn the body into the reader of the textuality of life.