Aesthetical and political education: The CrEA orientation, a challenge for a multicultural school

Abstract

The experience of growing up in Milan, in particular at NoLo, an immigrants’ neighborhood (that in recent years has been characterized thanks to a lively social mobilization); a school that tries to replay the fate of an – almost predictable – ghettoization of some classes; the idea of art as a formative possibility and emancipation of pupils and the practice of Social Theater that invites us to take back the political intentionality of educational actions and our being part of a community, placing ourselves as a frontier where there are collective and individual difficulties: these are some elements that form the background to the experience of a school curriculum, the CrEA (Creative-Expressive-Artistic), examined here, at a primary school in Milan, the “Ciresola”. For years the change in the school population towards an increasingly multicultural dimension has opened questions and solicited answers. Showing how schools can activate inclusion processes, rethinking the relationship between teaching and learning as a creative/performative dimension in itself, is one of the objectives of these pages. The experience presented here is still ongoing. It relaunches art and theater as innovative means that, focusing on the authorship of the group, lend themselves to translating the pedagogical/educational idea of a school in which children are the protagonists of their learning and teachers, in alliance with families and the territory, can contribute to regenerate the social fabric of the school and the city.