Memorie di maestre di campagna tra la Sicilia e la Toscana degli anni Cinquanta: Sara Cerrini ed Emma D’Ambra

This paper presents part of the results of a historical-educational study dedicated to the relationship between female education and rural areas in Italy in the 20th century. In particular, it reconstructs the educational practices of two rural teachers who worked in the 1950s, one in Tuscany, Sara Cerrini Melauri (1920-2012), and the other in Sicily, Emma D'Ambra (1935-), who experimented with new and innovative educational methodologies. The historical and social context is reconstructed from the memoirs of the two teachers, stories and testimonies of those marginalised realities that confirm the existence, at a time when Italian schools were divided between tradition and innovation, of a spontaneous grassroots movement of teachers committed to making schools a laboratory of conscious citizenship and participatory democracy. Looking back at our own time, the post-war experiments carried out by many frontier teachers seem to offer those involved in school education today a legacy to be taken up in order to relaunch small schools, or multi-classes teaching, located in peripheral or isolated areas, as dynamic, generative and transformative communities, special places for experimentation and school innovation.