My research is primarily in the field of education and social justice. I am especially interested in how progressive education can promote equity, inclusion and diversity. My work focused on the famous Reggio Emilia schools - public child-centred preschools in Italy that are known around the world for their high quality education.
I wrote about the history of foundation and development of these schools, especially as they were related to women's emancipation movements - a story that is often forgotten. I also examined how their progressive pedagogy changed and developed over time in connection to the changing political context. Topics I have written on include women's history, teachers' professionalism, and gender equity, race, class and sexuality in education.
In this paper, I examine memory as it relates to politics and early childhood education in the context of the internationally known preschools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. I draw a connection between foundational stories, ideologies connected to Italian politics in the 1970s, and the construction of the educational visions in these preschools.
In this article we examine the 2011 London Riots looking at the intersection of class, race and gender.
In this paper, I examine memory as it relates to origin stories of the Reggio Emilia approach – an internationally renewed Italian education program – and to the articulation of women’s experiences of gender and their narrative identity in this very particular context. My paper shows that a number of women who partook in the founding of the Reggio Emilia schools suffer from what Ricoeur terms ‘wounded memory’, which occurs when public recognition and legitimization of one’s own narrative is actively marginalised, suppressed or erased in historical, official and institutional accounts. I describe this experience and feeling shared by the Reggio Emilia women that I interviewed as a ‘wounded memory’, and argue that this ‘wounded memory’ can be linked to a wider concern with gender inequality. I conclude by presenting some of the missing accounts of leadership, creativity and initiative that I gathered among these women whose memory has been wounded.
This article discusses a collection of archival sources that I stumbled across while conducting research on issues of gender in Italian schools after World War II. The seven school journals considered here were published between 1973 and 1975, coinciding with the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Italy from the Nazi-Fascist Regime. This article considers their historical testimonies regarding the Italian Resistance, a popular movement against Nazi-Fascist oppression that took place between 1943 and 1945. These unique testimonies take the form of stories told to preschool children by their parents and grandparents, in schools in the North of Italy, specifically in the town of Reggio Emilia. The analysis of these exceptional documents reveals critical insights about how the past can be used in the service of the present to educate new generations.
Recent debates in queer studies have been concerned with the notion of utopia. Some have argued for a pro-utopian thesis that states that queer utopian thinking offers a channel for imagining new ways of living that can resist the hegemonic status quo, giving hope to marginalized subjects. Others rest upon an anti-utopian thesis arguing that utopian ideals present fixed prescriptions for the future that can complicate and undermine the aims of queer politics. This chapter explores these positions, particularly as they impinge upon educational theory and practice. Preliminary reflections around the promises and the problems of utopian images of childhood, in relation to the gendered and sexualized character of the educational discourse, are here weighed and assessed.
This article investigates whether the memories of women’s movements that grew out of the Italian Resistance to the Nazi-Fascist Regime during the Second World War have left any legacy to women teachers in early childhood education. The article focuses on the case of internationally renowned and high-quality schools for young children, the municipal schools of a northern Italian town called Reggio Emilia. In contrast to much of the literature on gender and early childhood education, this paper reveals that many women teachers in these schools think of themselves as agents of social change, and that this is tied to their memories of the Italian Resistance.