Let's diversify

Creative itineraries for the younger generations
4 theatrical performances for schools and training meetings for teachers

DIVERSIÀMOCI is an initiative that is part of the broader "Theater and Citizenship" project, which has been active since 2007 thanks to the collaboration between the former Department of Education of the University of San Marino, the current Department of Human Sciences, and the Department of of Education of the University of Bologna. This year the project will be dedicated to schools, teachers, children and teenagers with whom we want to face the challenges and complex scenarios of our time through theatrical language. The theme we will investigate is that of diversity, starting from gender differences, in order to be able to reflect on the possibility of recognizing and enhancing them, to prevent discrimination and violent behavior, the result of stereotypes and prejudices unable to dialogue with today's needs and realities . This process requires a greater critical awareness of the form and content that today's representations and ideas on gender differences take on in everyday life on the part of those who carry out educational functions within and outside the family. The creative itineraries want to reinforce the cultural and educational nature of the "Theater and Citizenship" project, addressing different audiences and offering a proposal that is articulated in a theatrical review, workshops and training meetings. To make concrete and strengthen this alliance between theater and school, between culture and education, it is necessary, on the one hand, that the theatrical "audience training" is configured as an indispensable element in the construction of inclusive cultural policies, which assign to culture not a mere market, but as an instrument of emancipation, of personal and collective growth, of public space. On the other hand, we must recognize the theatre's ability to be an educational and learning tool, in its aesthetic and artistic rigour, and not just a type of entertainment. Real deposits of creativity and innovation, the learning potential offered by the theater is not yet sufficiently developed but it will be able, indeed, it will have to be in the future, above all to respond to the indispensable need of contemporary societies to raise the levels of knowledge and competence of its own citizens, in particular to strengthen those social and personal skills which are the basis of formation for a critical and aware citizenship.

The main objective of the project is to promote cultural participation as a process of citizenship education that unites the school with the territory and its community. Cultural education is a process that opens up the possibility of understanding, experiencing and analyzing the complex and continuous changes in society. Starting from early childhood, it constitutes a necessary dimension of citizenship education, which is built through intellectual, social and cultural involvement, an alternation between knowledge and discovery which become experience. The project focuses on the education of future generations, setting itself some fundamental objectives:

• know and experience new forms of learning and expression;
• contribute to forming an aware and responsible citizen, able to analyze his own present, the environment in which he lives and to plan his own future;
• relate to others, respecting diversity, visions of the world.

Promoting active cultural participation therefore means learning to use, practice and experience the arts as an understanding, internalization and free interpretation of social reality; but also as a collective activity, as an expression of the process through which boys and girls negotiate, share and create culture among themselves and with adults.

The project is also intended as an educational path that allows the young public to read the works to make a thought emerge from them; it is an education in theatrical language so that every little spectator can ask himself questions and discuss possible answers with others. The path is divided into the vision of theatrical performances, accompanied by laboratory and training activities aimed at the classes and the teaching staff of the schools. It is constituted as a training itinerary that links the practice of vision to a guided reflection, which offers parameters for reading and interpreting the show. Talking about "active cultural participation" in relation to childhood and younger generations means considering cultural policy as a long project of citizenship education, developing a cultural vision that considers childhood an active subject and not an object-consumer-user. This reflection that links theater and culture, education and citizenship puts us before the challenge of an integral formation of the person, considering the plurality of belongings, contexts, the different dimensions of one's development and well-being, the cognitive, emotional, relationship, planning one. The social and economic transformations underway have modified and fragmented needs, made care models inadequate, have brought out phenomena of growing marginalization, inequalities and vulnerabilities, of mismatches between educational agencies. In these complex contexts, promoting a practice and a reflection on cultural participation means connecting theater and education to the concept of citizenship: theater can become, among the many possible ones, an irreplaceable experience for the growth and formation of the individual in the complex path of development that intertwines the perception of self with the relationship with the other, the private space with the social space, knowledge with emotions.

Itinerari creAttivi intends to offer the public – understood as children, families and school staff – the tools of understanding necessary to interpret the suggestions that emerge from the shows. The project includes a series of laboratory activities intended for teachers and managed by the Department of Human Sciences of the University of San Marino and the Department of Educational Sciences of the University of Bologna, which support the vision of the theatrical performances scheduled to create paths to share with students. The meetings are divided into different moments:

• viewing of the show and subsequent meeting between the classes, the actors-companies;
• meeting with the "pedagogical experts" to support teachers' reflection and planning, also to stimulate a public debate and with families.

The date will be agreed directly with the schools.

The appointments will start from some keywords, linked to each specific show aimed at:

• nursery school and kindergarten;
• Primary School;
• lower secondary school;
• upper secondary school.

In this perspective, particular consideration will be given to various artists and theatrical realities who are developing innovative forms of production, trying to conquer a new space in the childhood imagination; deepening aesthetic and artistic research paths that do not lead to simplification, but to the opening of possibilities with which childhood can begin to explore the world; activating creative processes in which the public, starting from the youngest one, does not passively enjoy, but is part of it; experimenting with new roles and new alliances within the integrated training system. Through these different approaches, the show becomes a time for active participation, a place for meeting and dialogue, a way to open up to oneself and to the imagination of the other, to experience the world. It becomes a hybrid and mestizo terrain, within which theater and education seek new fields of investigation, new encounters and new and more stable alliances between childhood, families, artists and teachers.