From the books to the woods : the history of the relationship between nature and childhood in the textbooks of the Italian part of Switzerland (1830-1940)

Abstract

If today the relationship between people and nature is a lively issue, this topic also occupies a prominent place in school. In the Swiss case, new courses on environmental education are offered to teachers. But the natural development of the child became particularly important in education since de 18th century. The learning and teaching possibilities offered by nature were also integrated into pedagogical reflections (Fuchs, 2014). Since then, nature can be considered in three ways in pedagogical discourse: it symbolizes and models the growth and development of the child; it offers environments to teaching and learning; it becomes the object of teaching and learning. The tension between these three dimensions is reflected as much in the teaching of reading and literature as in the modalities and content of teaching (Masoni & Tinembart, 2021). To highlight the evolution of these multiple features of nature, this paper aim to study the multiples presence of nature in reading books used in the schools of the canton Ticino (a mountainous and agricultural canton and the only one of Italian language in Switzerland) between 1830 and 1940. Based on the study of prescriptive texts, school programs and reading books, this paper will underline the evolution of the presence of nature in the schoolbooks of this Swiss cultural minority. We postulate that some of its characteristics persist throughout the century. They will then be concretized in recurrent and sedimented school knowledge. The use of a cultural transfers approach (Espagne, 1999) will also allow us to underline the circulation of a representation and use of nature shared at the Swiss level.

Bibliography

Espagne, Michel. Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Fuchs, Eckhardt. "Nature and Bildung: Pedagogical Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany." In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston, and Fernando Vidal, 155–81. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Masoni, Giorgia and Tinembart, Sylviane. (2021). "When Robinson Crusoe Taught Swiss Youth to Read: The Travel Writing as Child Natural Education". In Writing Journeys across Cultural Borders edited by Elena. V. Shabliy and Kimarie Engerman, 135-157. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.