Usually, when schools apply Public History of Education strategies, history and, more generically, the humanities, are the subjects chosen for hosting them. However ,Public History of Education, thanks to its broader aims, can be connected to scientific and technical subjects, as it can be considered as a methodology which aims at fostering pupils’ and students’ critical awareness towards everyday life (Bandini 2019; Bertuccelli 2017). Also technical and scientific subjects have undertaken an historical development which should be discovered and explored by Public History of Education, in order to make it visible and to show connection between this different field of knowledge. My paper proposal would like to explore this assumption, analysing a project realised last year in a vocational high school in Pescia, a little town near Lucca (Tuscany). The project involved students enrolled in a fourth-year class. Their study course is going to train them as car mechanicals. Though their age should been between 18 and 19 years old, the main part of them were older: Italian vocational schools are usually chosen by pupils who failed in achieving promotion in other kinds of high schools. The project aimed at apply Public History of Education methodologies on the background of a technical subject: Tecniche e Tecnologie di Manutenzione e di Installazione (“Technologies for Car Maintenance and Installation”). Topic chosen deals with safety rules, in order to enforce students’ awareness towards their relevance and their respect. Such a topic deserves to be analysed carefully as, still nowadays, too many Italian workers die on the job site: in 2023, 761 Italian workers have received fatal injuries while working. The project was divided in the following steps. Firstly, we compare how safety rules changed between 1930 and nowadays. For reaching such a task, the digital archive created and managed by the Istituto Luce has been largely used: https://www.archivioluce.com/. The digital archive includes thousands of short films realised by fascist Government; among them, several short films show workshops in vocational schools. The external link included in this submission constitutes an example of such a policy. Students were initially attracted by historical videos who deals with events so close to their everyday life; then, they started automatically in comparing videos with their experience. Such comparison led to a discussion about what changed throughout the last century and which laws intervened in enforcing workers’ safety. As a final task, students realised infographs (with the tool Canva, https://www.canva.com/it_it/) aiming at explaining how workers’ safety rules have been changing during XX and XXI century. Conclusions are going to show the potential Public History of Education can disclose when it is combined with scientific, technical subjects and when it is applied in a relatively poor educative context, as Italian vocational high schools (Oliviero 2021). Such perspective makes Public History Education a valid strategy for achieving what Edgard Morin (1999) called a “tête bien faite”, as the strict boundaries which characterises scholastic subjects are overtaken. Therefore, the contamination between scientific fields proves to be fruitful (Braidotti 2013).

In December 2021, the Memory Centre of the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (NuMem/IFRS) launched its digital repository, using the Tainacan software, developed by the Network Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Brasilia (UnB). One of the concerns was to overcome the barriers to accessing the material and immaterial cultures produced by the IFRS (such as reports, pedagogical projects for courses, minutes, photographs of events), given the dispersion of the collections on institutional sites and the distance from the physical storage locations at the institution. The creation of the digital repository marked a concern to systematise public access to the memory and history of the institution and Professional and Technological Education (PTE) in Brazil, using digital technologies to make available its documentary collection, made up of image (photographs), audiovisual and printed documents, organised by themes related to different contexts, from the 1940s to the present. Our paper will present the efforts made by NuMem/IFRS to identify, digitise, catalogue and make available the records produced by the IFRS units and their predecessors, as well as materials created by NuMem/IFRS, such as oral testimonies and podcasts. In almost three years of activities, more than 10,000 records have been identified and made available in the digital repository, distributed in collections organised by document type and special projects. However, it is a small representation of IFRS educational culture, which has required different strategies: websites and social networks linked to IFRS units, for example, are mapped by the NuMem/IFRS team, and their material (photographs, printed materials) is identified and downloaded to a temporary virtual storage location. They are then catalogued and registered in the digital repository using basic information (date, subject, authorship, theme/event), accompanied by keywords defined by the team relating to the context of the document. Of these records, the collection of photographs is at a more advanced stage of organisation and provides an opportunity to get to know the different school cultures present in the IFRS, from solemnities (graduations, inaugurations, visits from authorities) to "ordinary" activities (classroom activities, scientific initiation exhibitions, sports practices). Based on these records, the digital repository can contribute to studies that identify the different conceptions of PTE present in the IFRS over time, such as the ambivalence between technicist perspectives and emancipatory perspectives in the training of student-workers in the IFRS. In general terms, the construction of the digital repository should recognise the diversity of records and the plurality of conceptions of PTE, contributing to the development of research into the History of Education and Professional Education.

Em dezembro de 2021, o Núcleo de Memória do Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Sul (NuMem/IFRS) lançou seu repositório digital, a partir do software Tainacan, desenvolvido pelo Laboratório de Inteligência de Redes da Universidade de Brasília (UnB). Uma das preocupações era superar as barreiras de acesso às culturas materiais e imateriais produzidas pelo IFRS (tais como relatórios, projetos pedagógicos de cursos, atas, fotografias de eventos), tendo em vista a dispersão dos acervos em sites institucionais e distância dos locais de guarda de acervos físicos existentes na instituição. A criação do repositório digital marcou a preocupação em sistematizar acesso público à memória e à história da instituição e da Educação Profissional e Tecnológica (EPT) no Brasil, valendo-se das tecnologias digitais para disponibilizar seu acervo documental, composto por acervo documentos imagéticos (fotografias), audiovisuais e impressos, organizados por temas relacionados aos diferentes contextos, desde os anos 1940 até o presente. Nosso trabalho vai apresentar os esforços desenvolvidos pelo NuMem/IFRS em identificar, digitalizar, catalogar e disponibilizar os registros produzidos pelas unidades do IFRS e suas antecessoras, assim como materiais criados pelo NuMem/IFRS, como depoimentos orais e podcasts. Em quase três anos de atividades, foram identificados e disponibilizados mais de 10.000 registros no repositório digital, distribuídos em coleções organizadas por tipos documentais e projetos especiais. No entanto, é uma pequena representação da cultura escolar do IFRS, o que tem exigido diferentes estratégias: sites e redes sociais vinculadas às unidades do IFRS, por exemplo, são mapeados pela equipe do NuMem/IFRS, sendo seu material (fotografias, impressos) identificados e baixados em um local provisório de guarda virtual. Após, eles são catalogados e cadastrados no repositório digital a partir de informações básicas (data, tema, autoria, tema/evento), acompanhadas de palavras-chave definidas pela equipe relacionadas ao contexto do documento. Destes registros, o acervo de fotografias encontra-se em um estado mais adiantado de organização e oportunizam conhecer as diferentes culturas escolares presentes no IFRS, envolvendo solenidades (formaturas, inaugurações, visitas de autoridades) até as atividades “ordinárias” (atividades de sala de aula, mostras de iniciação científica, práticas esportivas). A partir desses registros, o repositório digital pode contribuir para estudos que identifiquem as diferentes concepções da EPT presentes no IFRS ao longo do tempo, como a ambivalência entre perspectivas tecnicistas e perspectivas emancipatórias na formação de estudantes-trabalhadores no IFRS. Em linhas gerais, a construção do repositório digital deve reconhecer a diversidade de registro e a pluralidade de concepções sobre EPT, contribuindo para o desenvolvimento de pesquisas em História da Educação e Educação Profissional.

Experiences of Public History can be developed in connection with the historical-educational field to support the meeting between the academy and social memory. The purpose of this research is to investigate Public History and its relationship with history of reading through the presentation of the project “Madeleine in Biblioteca”, realized in cooperation with some Tuscan libraries and book clubs and aimed at recover people’s reading memories, from childhood to adulthood. History of reading, in its fascinating complexity, is in fact extremely wide and rich in very heterogeneous documentary sources. Among these play a not-secondary role the autobiographical testimonies of readers, their unique and subjective experiences, their individual stories that participate in a collective history and can highlight the less investigated aspects. Focused on important learning, the project includes: 1) the web site www.madeleineinbiblioteca.it, a digital space to return people’s memories linked to the related Instagram Page “Madeleine.Lab”; 2) a series of workshops in the library and webinar realized with oral sources to reflect on the history of reading, for example: secretly reading and family censorship, children’s book, women's reading, textbooks and school, reading circles. The objective is to enhance the importance of thinking historically and to involve the public of non-specialists in the construction of the historical narrative. This project is a first attempt to apply public history methods to less-explored fields such as the history of reading, and to investigate through oral sources the history of education, and to promote a dialogue between citizens and learning places. In this context, libraries can play a key role to put in touch the scholars with the social memory, proving to be not only places to collect and store books but centres of experience and knowledge at the service of the public.

The aim of this communication is to present the origin, phases, and results of practice of public history of education, through a collaborative history experience in which the History of Education Study Group (GEDHE) of the University of the Balearic Islands is participating as an "instigator" (Myers & Grosvenor, 2018, p. 26), in the framework of a research project entitled: "Public history of education in Spain (1970-2020). Social perceptions, memories and construction of imaginaries about teachers and their practices". This experience responds to GEDHE's commitment to recovering the social function of the history of education, involving non-academic agents from the local communities, and promoting historical knowledge among broader and non-specialised audiences. The starting point of this experience has been summer camps as a historical-educational practice. The evolution of these camps from the end of the 19th century to the present day has been studied by GEDHE at an academic level (Comas-Rubí, Motilla-Salas & Sureda-Garcia, 2011; Sureda Garcia & Comas-Rubí, 2013; Llinàs-Ferrà & Sureda-Garcia, 2014). But, beyond this academic interest, the history of these camps also seems to arouse social interest. Possibly because they are experiences that the public knows or has experienced, but whose past is unknown to them. They are also of interest to educational communities, because of their relationship with pedagogical renewal movements, and because of the use of natural spaces for educational purposes. In the Balearic Islands, moreover, this is a current issue due to the difficulties implied by the tourist saturation of the coast for the development of this type of activity. The first phase of this experience arose after an offer from the General Archive of the Consell de Mallorca, in order to help them to produce an exhibition on the subject, using the collections of the first summer camps preserved in this institution. The result of this initiative was the exhibition "The summer camps of the Balearic Provincial Government (1893-1936: The documentary legacy", produced between the archive and GEDHE, under the formula of “shared authority” (Sureda-Garcia, 2023). In a second stage, various activities have been carried out in collaboration with the university community: teaching innovation projects with the participation of teachers and students, dissemination conferences aiming general audiences, guided visits for interested groups, etc. Given the interest and the different testimonies about experiences in colonies generated by the exhibition and its activities, GEDHE decided to extend the experience to a third phase, which is currently being developed. This is a crowdsourcing project entitled "I went to summer camps too", (Jo també vaig anar de campaments i colònies, 2023; 2024). The aim is to compile testimonies and materials about the most recent camps in the Balearic Islands, with special emphasis on lesser-known activities, involving the people who participated in these experiences. With this project we intend to build a community of collective memory around the camps, opening the possibility of promoting new activities of conservation, management and dissemination of the legacy of these educational activities.

Funded by: [PID2020-113677GB-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033] &
[FJC2021-046940-I/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/NextGenerationEU/PRTR].