Sherlock Holmes inside a textbook. Archaeology of a teacher training text from the early 19th century = Sherlock Holmes entra nel cuore di un libro di testo. Archeologia di un manuale per maestri del primo Ottocento in Italia

In Italy, since the late 1990s there have been many research works on school and educational publishing, interlacing with the current fields of investigation common in Europe and beyond. Numerous earlier studies offered historians deeper knowledge of school publishing, in terms of the production and distribution of school textbooks between the 19th and 20th centuries, school publishers, legislation on school textbooks and the ideologies and values underlying school text. However, very few studies have investigated the aspects specifically linked to the history of the subject teaching methods in these books, and their everyday practical use and application by the teachers in the class. This essay analyses a teacher training manual to identify the words and expressions that offer clues and signs of the underlying methodological and teaching traditions, revealing the pedagogic and educational knowledge used for teacher education. The work analyses a teacher training manual, like a young Sherlock Holmes searching with a magnifying glass for clues among single words or sentences that can reveal the archeologically stratified teaching traditions of the early 19th century.