Abstract:

Nowadays, digital technologies represent an increasingly essential component of our socio-cultural fabric since they have now become the core space for knowledge production and sharing at different levels, thus showing a highly communitarian feature. Consequently, their marked presence in everyone’s contemporary life is also having a growing impact on the school ecosystem, by challenging continuously teaching and learning processes. Therefore, it proves necessary to make future citizens able to manage new media literacies, with a view to fostering both a critical understanding of digital daily contents and an informed use of media from a very early age to provide children with appropriate tools towards independent, aware, ethical and responsible action within society. Such concept fully reflects the educational perspective introduced even more than a century ago by the pedagogist Maria Montessori, whose methodological principles are aimed at supporting basic cultural literacy as well as civil coexistence through an ongoing process of individual’s self-realization along with others. Despite being still adopted today in about sixty-five thousand institutions worldwide, research on how to integrate innovative digital practices within the traditional Montessori approach is still limited, putting at risk its capacity of facing future challenges and govern massive technological change. In this regard, the present paper illustrates and discusses the educational implications of an experience of active exploration and discovery concerning critical media analysis and production implemented as part of the European project “Inclusive and Creative Media Education” (ICME) (CREA-CROSS-2022-MEDIALITERACY, 2022-2024). In particular, the activities were carried out from May to June 2024 within a Montessori fourth class of the “Vittorio Veneto” State Primary School, which is located in the “Centro Storico Pestalozzi” Comprehensive Institute of Florence, Central Italy. Through a detailed description of the theoretical framework and the learning scenario designed, dealing with gender stereotypes promoted by children’s commercials and use of the social media platform TikTok for civic purposes, the contribution will highlight how the correlation between Media Education practices and educational objectives of Montessori pedagogy fosters pupils’ critical media literacy, by improving their understanding, expression and engagement in the learning process.

Keywords:

Media Education, Montessori pedagogy, critical media literacy.