Interdisciplinary Materials for the Secondary School Classroom

For the Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference in Durham in the summer of 2013, I was invited (in the context of this research project) to talk about interdisciplinarity in the secondary school teaching of Italian. My talk sought to highlight how over the last forty years or so the modern languages curriculum in schools and especially at A Level had moved from an unashamedly monodisciplinary focus on literary study to a much broader approach based on the principle of language learning in order to facilitate communication. Since then a new A level syllabus has emerged which has to some extent reemphasised the importance of the study of literature (and film), but in essence retains the need for a student to study defined themes or topics whilst at the same time developing knowledge of the language itself.

So, what scope is there for an interdisciplinary approach in the teaching of modern languages in the sixth form today? And what indeed might ‘interdisciplinary’ mean in the context of the study of a language in school? This is a question I and others have explored with Prof. Giuliana Pieri in recent months, particularly how the photographic image or the illustration can help students to both gain a deeper understanding of the topic being studied but also learn the language required to describe and comment upon the image and articulate the relationship between text, image and history. We decided to focus on the A Level topic ‘From Fascism to today’ which is intended to cover broadly the period from 1919 to 1957 and experiment with some exemplar resources. I will mention two such resources, which can be found alongside others at the following link.

The first example is a programme of work designed to complement the study of the rise of fascism. Having identified an article by Calvino published in La repubblica in 1983 called ‘Cominciò con un cilindro’, where he talks of his memories of images of Mussolini, the task was to use the material in the article to evince spoken and written responses in Italian from students and guide them towards what photographs of Mussolini tell us about his methods and the importance of the visual image in propaganda and the rise of Fascism.

The second is derived from a chance discovery of a school exercise book from the fascist period which had on the front a drawing of an idyllic house in the country which could have been an illustration in any children’s book. On the back there is a text written by Margherita Sarfatti under the title Un uomo e un impero: La casa paterna which turns out to be an account of the birth of Mussolini in terms which recall the fairy tale C’era una volta un paesino piccolo, piccolo. What do we learn from the interaction of image and text? What does study of text and image together do to advance and enhance a student’s understanding of fascist propaganda that cannot be learned or expressed through an analytical or factual text?

We have also looked at how the Futurist Manifesto can be suitably exploited and how the study of images of young people under fascism can be a way in to enriching the students’ experience while further plans include seeing how music of the period or clips from films such as Una giornata particolare can be incorporated into the study of a topic.

Yet the challenge will always remain in the secondary school world that all this has to be presented to students in units of work which fit into the pattern of lessons and homework, remembering that students are learning at the same time (and in the same lessons) how to express their knowledge and understanding in the ‘target language’ accurately in both speaking and writing.