Testimonianze sulla scuola nel territorio marchigiano in età contemporanea. L‘archivio delle fonti orali come patrimonio storico e come strumento per la didatica della storia nella scuola primaria, Dottorato di ricerca in Human Sciences, ciclo XXXII, Università degli studi di Macerata, anno accademico 2018-2019,

This research aims to demonstrate the great heuristic potential of oral sources in the historical-educational field through the collection and analysis of a large sample of testimonies of former teachers and students on schools in the Marche region in contemporary times. Although the use of oral sources is now widely accepted by educational historiography, the few studies undertaken in the specific field of the history of education on the use of these resources show that this is a largely unexplored territory. A questionnaire was submitted to 52 people who attended primary schools, both former students and teachers, in order to investigate various aspects of school matters, including: the real didactic and educational practices performed in the classroom, the actual school culture and the educational habits between 1930s and 1970s. Starting with an overview of the most recent historiographical trends in the historical-educational field and continuing with a report of the most recent studies on the methodology of collection and analysis of oral sources – taking into account the methodological problems in the collection of oral sources – the first chapter of this work illustrates the first Italian researches of these years. The second chapter focuses on the results of the collection of testimonies, with particular attention to two features: on the one hand, the working methodology and on the other hand, the main themes emerged from the interviews, highlighting the importance of oral sources in the historical-educational research in order to learn real educational customs and teaching practices in the classroom at that time. The most significant statements were extrapolated from the interviews and analyzed, giving greater consideration to those aspects of school life emerging mainly through the oral testimony, thus providing a much less monolithic picture of primary schools in the Marche region than if studied from a historical-institutional point of view. Finally, after describing some projects of public history during which the first results of this research were illustrated and which allowed to start a proactive dialogue with the society, the third chapter describes all the structural phases of a workshop for primary schools on the topic of oral sources, in collaboration with the didactic commission of a School Museum of the University of Macerata called "Paolo e Ornella Ricca". This workshop not only demonstrated how the school's intangible heritage can become a tool for teaching history at school, but also allowed students to acquire a series of cross-functional skills in multimedia and journalism. In conclusion, the present research aims to demonstrate that oral sources represent an important resource to face the new heuristic challenges of educational historiography. Through the strong voices of the main protagonists of the school of the past, it is in fact possible to investigate which was the "real school" behind the "legal" one studied through manuals, pedagogical press and legislation, and to reconstruct a new history of didactics, including real educational practices, performed in the classroom.