Interart in Schools – London, 18 June 2016

On Saturday 18 June 2016, the Italian Cultural Institute in London hosted a very exciting and extremely well attended conference organised by the ISMLA (Independent Schools Modern Languages Association) and the SIS (Society of Italian Studies). Over sixty secondary schools, both from the independent and state sector, were represented.

Peter Langdale (North London Collegiate) was the chief organiser. Peter has been a great and very active supporter of our project. It was thus fitting that Interdisciplinary Italy was given the opportunity to launch our Interart in Schools project with a session in which we presented a project that will develop over the next two years.

Interdisciplinary Futurism focuses on Italian Futurism and will see three schools and three sets of students working together. The idea we are testing is what happens to the students’ learning when we put them in dialogue with other students who have studied the same topic from a different disciplinary perspective. How do Historians, Art Historians and students of Italian study Futurism? What specific contributions come from the different disciplines? The politics, art and writings of Futurism were all interconnected. So we are taking students on a journey back in time to see how the three aspects were conceived as one interconnected bundle of ideas and practices. A series of blog posts will follow the project over the next two years as it travels between The Sixth Form College, Farnborough, Queen Margaret’s School, York, and another partner school. If you would like to get involved, please contact Giuliana Pieri at g.pieri@rhul.ac.uk

Here you can find a copy of the presentation which also includes information on a related project, Italian Fascism: a collaborative project.  The study of Italian Fascism will move out of the disciplinary confines of the History curriculum in order to engage students with aspects of the visual culture of the regime and the much larger issue of how we remember the past. This is a collaboration between The Sixth Form College, Farnborough, a secondary school in Ragusa (Sicily) and Royal Holloway University of London. Dr David Brown and Prof Giuliana Pieri will keep us up-to-date on their progress through this blog. They are keen to hear from you. Have you worked with schools in Italy before? Are you running any projects with universities? Have you organised master classes to bring research-led, university level teaching into your classroom?

We hope that the projects will inspire you to engage with the potential of Interart in Schools and interdisciplinarity in the classroom. The benefits are many. There are the lofty ideals: in a world which is increasingly complex, globalised, but also culturally fragmented and disconnected, the ability to dialogue with those in other disciplines, is important. Creativity is not easily contained in neat disciplinary boundaries. And there are the practical considerations. How do we promote our disciplines and draw interesting connections between them? If you study aspects of Italian culture in your curriculum, a more rounded (and less disciplinary defined) understanding of Italy, its language, history and politics will create the perfect platform for the student engagement which is the foundation of effective teaching and learning.