L’educazione ai patrimoni culturali come strumento di resilienza

From many quarters the belief is being reiterated that teaching and training activities cannot have educational spaces as their sole location and that they must extend to external places, across what we call the territory. The latter, in its many tangible and intangible cultural forms, in services, in cultural places (museums, theaters and libraries) and in production, is transformed into an ‘expanded’ training system in terms of environments, living spaces and community, when it allows the school to leave its physical site and offers interpretative possibilities for the symbolic repertoires of culture, in terms of signs and meanings. This also applies to the entire citizenship (children, teens and adults), where such enlargement and engagement is positive, when adequate conditions are created for the use of those elements that qualify the territory and if coordination is envisaged between them, strengthening and specializing educational interventions, within a system that can be called ‘integrated’. In fact, integration is the only means to ensure greater effectiveness of the expansion. In this sense, the city becomes an educational space, aimed at strengthening the repertoire of skills of the population, when the heritages present in it, in all their forms (demo-ethno-anthropological, artistic, historical, etc.) and meanings (individual and social), become accessible and interpretable by the entire community, without exclusions, and by the different categories of users (school public, families, etc.). The premise of expansion therefore enables the implementation of ‘strong’ methodological choices that take into account the particular needs of users, concrete opportunities and expendable skills. In this sense, this contribution, making use of the most advanced empirical educational research, pauses to analyze the case’ of the city of L’Aquila, which, struck by the seismic event of 2009, which produced in individuals a tangible and personal ‘existential displacement’ and which has partly ‘disfigured the personal, cultural and social heritage of the community, whose identity requires to be’ refounded’, needs, in order to be adequately interpreted, suitable educational tools to enable individuals to decode signs and symbols to re-read its territory, starting from a multifocal and interdisciplinary didactic perspective. In this direction, it pauses to examine the cultural and social characteristics of the Aquila fabric, as well as those of production and research, to encourage training activities at all levels in an attempt to develop educational proposals capable of positively affecting the perception of individuals and transforming didactic planning in the field of heritage as a strategy for dealing with difficulties and, therefore, a concrete tool for resilience