«Knowledge laboratories» is an idea of the Educational Avant-garde movement fruit of the synergy between INDIRE and the «Laboratories of scientific knowledge», born in the Tuscany Region in 2010 in collaboration with CIDI and the world of University and research – in agreement with the school regional offices – for the purpose of setting up permanent research/innovation groups in Tuscan schools of all levels in the field of mathematical-scientific and technological education.

The «Knowledge laboratories» idea consists in extending the methodological approach of the «laboratories of scientific knowledge» also to school disciplines other than STEM, such as, upon an initial analysis, Italian, and other fields, recovering the transversal aspects of the disciplines themselves, identifying their common and founding features, including, for example, the phenomenological approach or attention to language and parlance.

The «Knowledge laboratories» idea holds together the methodological structure and the disciplinary curriculum thanks to the development of exemplary educational paths, which can be applied to any educational context, which combine attention to knowledge and student motivation; the motivations that lead to putting them into practice arise from the desire to bring the laboratory approach into the school by applying it to every disciplinary area. The goal is to overcome the transmission model of teaching, that model that reduces learning to the mere acquisition of “pre-cooked” knowledge.

The Guidelines of the «knowledge laboratories» Idea, freely downloadable from the dedicated page, contain – in addition to the essential theoretical framework – the so-called «logbooks» of seven schools: they are the IC “Scarperia-San Piero” (Scarperia and San Piero, FI), the IC “Barberino di Mugello” (Barberino di Mugello, FI), the IC “Grosseto 1 – Alberto Manzi” (Grosseto), the “IC Govone” (Govone, CN), the ‘”IC of Cadeo and Pontenure” (Roveleto di Cadeo, PC), the IIS “Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti” (Sesto Fiorentino, FI) and the Liceo Classico “Vincenzo Monti” (Cesena, FC); these are seven of the fifteen schools which, over the two cycles of education (for the second cycle limited to the first two years), participated in the experimentation of the Idea, an experimentation that today extends to other schools in addition to those reported in the Guidelines.

The «logbooks» to which the Guidelines refer constitute a precious documentation in which to grasp not only the richness of the educational practice of the paths implemented but also the reflections of the teachers, their arguments and doubts, the difficulties encountered and the satisfactions for the results achieved.

Consult the Guidelines of the « Knowledge Laboratories» idea