“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, the television drama presents part of the personal and working life of a middle school teacher. A rigorous teacher and champion of “old-fashioned” transmission of knowledge, Mirella (Vanessa Incontrada) soon finds herself questioning all of her fixed points. It is her colleague Felice (Flavio Insinna) who reveals to her the limits of a teaching method that excludes diversity, which is why he creates – outside of school hours – a “class of donkeys”, open to those rejected by the school of the time. The transfer of one of her troubled pupils to an institute characterized by coercive and violent methods, as well as the removal of her daughter with a serious disability from a private institution in which she was enrolled and which considered her incapable of any learning, made Mirella understand the need for public schools to renew themselves to become a place that responded to every special need. She continued this fight even after becoming principal, deciding to welcome pupils with disabilities into the classes of the complex she managed. The film had a large following with the public. The audience reached 6 million viewers and the drama won hands down the prime time debate. By addressing a theme that was almost ignored by Italian filmography, the audiovisual has the merit of having shed light on a crucial period for Italian schools, characterized – among other things – by a debate whose outcome was the promulgation in the Seventies of laws for the integration of subjects with disabilities in ordinary classes. A difficult landing, marked by a clear break with practices that are certainly exclusive, but often also promoters of specialized teaching, and by a "wild inclusion" of disabled people that is not without difficulties. Bearing this context in mind, the contribution, which follows the historical-educational studies on collective school memory, aims to probe the representation of inclusive schooling emerging from "The Donkey Class", revealing how much and what influence was exerted on the film by the pedagogical and cultural sensitivity of our time.