To browse Academia. Rather, this study argues that national identity is a product of the intimate, everyday interactions between students and their institutional environments, experiences that are often lived through narratives and discourses inherited not only from the school curriculum, but from popular and commercial cultures as well. This call for papers is part of the research activities envisaged for the project of significant national interest entitled School Memories between Social Perception and Collective Representation Italy, The intention is to continue the line of research inaugurated by the international symposium on School Memories.
The research project focuses on forms of school memory, understood as the individual, collective and public practice of remembering a common school past Yanes-Cabrera et al. Individual school memory consists of self-representation supplied by former teachers, members of the school administration, and pupils through oral and written testimonies e.
Collective school memory, on the other hand, is composed of the many ways in which the culture industry literature, cinema, music, etc. These representations of school past become layered from generation to generation, partly superimposing themselves on personal memories, corrupting factual reality and consolidating themselves into stereotyped narrations. They may also alter our awareness of the past, which is thus transformed into a real space in our imagination that cannot be separated from scientifically-based historical reconstructions Alfieri, Finally, public school memory consists of how schools and teachers are represented in official contexts and public commemorations promoted by local and national institutions based on a precise policy of memory, or public use of the past aimed at gaining consensus and reinforcing the feeling of belonging to a specific community Yanes-Cabrera et al.
Unlike individual school memory, collective memory and public memory have barely been touched on in historical-education research as they have not been considered a subject of historiographic importance for some time. In recent years, however, school memory β in its various meanings β has been included in international historiographic thought and has become the subject of studies of notable interest in the field of the history of education both in Latin-American countries and in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The study of memory allows us to define how the present looks at the past and interprets or reinterprets it. In this sense, school memory does not interest us merely as a channel to access the schools of the past, but as a key to understanding what we know today or believe we know about schools of the past and how far what we know corresponds to reality, or whether our understanding is merely the result of prejudices and stereotypes that have become ingrained in the common sentiment, and difficult to uproot.
