The meeting of Bruno Munari with Active Learning: The pedagogical foundations of the “playing wth Art “workshops.

Abstract

This paper asks which pedagogical ideas influenced the “Playing with art” workshops created by Bruno Munari in the 1970’s, which radically transformed the understanding of museum didactics and aesthetic-artistic education. The author suggests that the workshops take up elements of pedagogical activism even though Munari makes no direct reference to this in his writings. For this reason the article tries to reconstruct the most significant meetings that may have influenced the approach to Active Learning. In particular it looks at the relationship Munari had with the writer Gianni Rodari and the pedagogist Giovanni Belgrano. Both Rodari and Belgrano were linked (albeit in different ways) to the Movement for Co-operative Education which aimed to reform Italian education along Deweyian lines. Through their influence Munari may have been brought closer to Activism with which he shared many beliefs. These range from the need to encourage creativity in children through experimentation with materials and techniques, to the conception of the educator as an animator of activities aimed at mastering different types of knowledge. The article sets out to show the continuity between this theoretical line and the reflections on the democratisation of art taken up by Munari as early as 1948 with the foundation of the Movimento Arte Concreta along with other artists