“Frontier teachers – Stories of small schools in the long course of the twentieth century” is the project aimed at publishing online and disseminating the pages of the personal diaries of ten ‘frontier’ female teachers employed in the most remote places of Italy at the beginning of the 1900s.

Actress Elisa Cecilia Langone has given voice to these stories, which have turned into a series of freely accessible podcasts.

The contexts that form the background to the stories are territories in which the identity of a teacher had to necessarily fade to make room for the encounter with complex realities linked to linguistic, cultural and social differences.

Alone and without support, the teachers interpreted in the podcasts represent some of the very numerous protagonists of the mass schooling process, aimed at the peripheral areas of the country and at a marginalized “diversity” simply considered “something to be overcome”. For this reason, thanks to the diaries, memories and narrations of these teachers, significant reflections emerge from the individual biographical-professional stories linked to a pedagogical, historical and social analysis of an Italy that is very often ignored or underestimated.

The project was also born in relation to the desire to make useful contents available for teaching in the classroom and as an opportunity to disseminate the study of historical sources and in the field of Public History. This series of podcasts is an integral part of the research that began with the Small Schools Booklets compiled by Pamela Giorgi (Indire researcher) and the teacher Raffaella Calgaro (ITT “G. Chilesotti” Thiene – Vicenza).

Technical creation of the podcasts by Michele Squillantini and Fabiana Bertazzi.