History of education and children’s literature in the Italian universities (1988-2013). Anatomy of a university discipline between teaching, scientific research and cultural presence

The contribution presents the main purposes and the scientific lines of a research aiming at deepening the characteristics and the perspectives acquired by the discipline of the History of education/Storia dell’educazione and, more generally, by the whole spectrum of the disciplines included in the scientific and disciplinary field M-PED/02 (Storia della Pedagogia) in the Italian university system. The research, which represents the Italian chapter of a more exhaustive investigation developed within the framework of the ISCHE (International Standing Conference on the History of Education) and under the European coordination of Alexandre Fontaine (Université de Genève), Rita Hofstetter (Université de Genève), Emmanuelle Picard (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) and Solenn Huitric (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon), intends to focus on the time-span from 1988 to 2013 and to examine in depth the following topics: chairs and teaching courses, as well as doctoral courses of history of education (Storia dell’Educazione) and, more in general, the disciplines included in the scientific and disciplinary field M-PED/02 (Storia della Pedagogia) established and started in the Italian universities; research projects carried out at Italian and international level financed – in the above mentioned time span – respectively by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and by the European Union; scientific and cultural initiatives (conferences, seminars and workshops at national and international level) organized by the different Italian universities on topics related to the disciplines belonging to the scientific and disciplinary field M-PED/02 (Storia della Pedagogia); scientific reviews and specialized editorial collections which are part of the same scientific and disciplinary field; Documentation and research centers specialized in the field of the history of education and of children’s literature (departmental or between departments; inside one university of between some universities) and school and Didactics Museums established inside the Italian universities. Finally, the research intends to deepen the achievements and the initiatives carried out, in the period 1988-2013, by the Italian Center of the History of Education research/Centro Italiano per la Ricerca Storico-Educativa (CIRSE), a scientific society raised in the 1980 under the impulse of the historians of education and children’s literature in Italy.