School Desk Between Tradition And Modernity: The Technological Renewal In Open Air Schools

School desks have always been an important item in school settings and have been studied internationally in terms of both pedagogy and the material culture of school, as a fundamental tool for traditional frontal, transmissive and authoritarian teaching methods. The purpose of this work is to examine an important step in the history of education linked to the evolution of the school desk, i.e., the birth and development of openair schools in the early 20th century for the instruction and educational care of fragile children predisposed to tuberculosis. Precisely the need for a mainly outdoor educational setting led hygienists and educators to seek new technological solutions that were more functional than the traditional, heavy wooden twoseater desks, suited more to static, mainly indoor teaching. Using international literature from that time as well as more recent works, we will investigate the interplay between medicine, hygiene and schools from the second half of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century in the development of alternative models of school desks proposed and found in openair schools, suited to a new form of teaching practice that was attentive to the freedom of movement and action of these outdoor pupils, within the emerging framework of pedagogic activism of the time. Using printed and photographic archive sources, we will then focus attention on some cases of openair schools in Italy, to underline the role played by this new generation of school desks, their material features, for innovative educational practices that paid attention to the freedom of the body and of educational action, both for literacy, sciences and free drawing.