"La classe degli asini" approda in TV: un caso di odierna rappresentazione audiovisiva dello storico processo di integrazione degli alunni con disabilità

[Autom. eng. transl.] On November 14, 2016, the film "La classe degli asini", directed by Andrea Porporati, was broadcast on Rai1. Set in Turin in the 1960s and inspired by Professor Mirella Antonione Casale's contribution to inclusive teaching (Levita, 2019), the television drama presents part of the personal and working life of a middle school teacher. A rigorous teacher and champion of the "old-fashioned" transmission of knowledge, Mirella (Vanessa Incontrada) soon finds herself questioning all her fixed points. It is her colleague Felice (Flavio Insinna) who reveals to her the limits of a teaching that excludes diversity, which is why he gives shape - in extra-school hours - to a "donkey class", open to those rejected by the school of the time. The transfer of one of her troubled pupils to an institution based on constricting and violent methods, as well as the removal of her daughter with a serious disability from a private institution to which she was enrolled and which considers her incapable of any learning, make Mirella understand the need for the public school to be renewed to become a place of response to every special need. She continues this struggle even once she has become headmaster, deciding to welcome schoolchildren with disabilities in the classes of the complex she directs. The film had a large following from the public. The audience was close to 6 million viewers and the drama won the comparison of the first evening hands down. By tackling a topic almost ignored by Italian filmography, the audiovisual industry has the merit of having shed light on a crucial period for the Italian school, characterized - among other things - by a debate whose outcome was the promulgation in the 1970s of laws for the integration of people with disabilities in common classes. Not an easy landing, marked by a clear break with practices that are certainly exclusive, but often also promoters of specialized teaching, and by a "wild insertion" of the disabled, not without difficulties (Cottini, 2017; Polenghi, 2021). Keeping this context in mind, the contribution, which arises in the wake of historical-educational studies on collective school memory, aims to probe the representation of inclusive school emerging from "The class of donkeys", noting how much and what influence has been exercised on the film by the pedagogical and cultural sensitivity of our time.