1,279 research outputs found
Per una storia delle tecnologie dell'istruzione: l'aula scolastica
Nel corso dell'Ottocento l'edificio scolastico assunse un carattere istituzionale divenendo espressione della volontĂ statale di istruire in contesti formalizzati e laici, i propri cittadini. Le permanenze di precedenti modelli educativi resteranno, tuttavia, piĂč o meno leggibili per molto tempo. Nell'articolo, che Ăš stato pensato come materiale di supporto ad una lezione in videoconferenza con il prof. Piercesare Rivoltella dell'UniversitĂ Cattolica, sui temi dei mutamenti nelle pratiche didattiche tra XIX e XXI secolo, si analizzano, sulla base di puntuali ricerche archivistiche, i cambiamenti nell'aula scolastica
How âbeneficialâ virus of popular education âcontaminatedâ Sardinia island, in the first half of the 19th century
Popular education has played an important role in order to build the national Italian
identity. Many researchers show that, after unification of Italy (1861), the
government paid attention to primary schools: teachers not only taught reading,
writing and calculating but also spread new values such as patriotism, positivism,
rationalism. The aim of my paper is to study this kind of schools in the first half of
19th century, when Italy was shared in many States, everyone with different
education policies. Iâm going to concentrate my attention on an independent and
isolated region: Sardinia.
In natural history, islands are quite interesting because scientists can study
autochthon species and understand when local environment keeps in contact with
outside ecosystems. I think historians can do what scientists do, if they want to
investigate the beginning of popular school in Sardinia.
After four centuries of Spanish domination, in 1720, the island passed under the rule
of Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoia, prince of Piemonte, member of the Sabaudi
dynasty. Only after a century of Savoia domination, the kings Carlo Felice and Carlo
Alberto could begin a systematic program of reforms that was continued after the
unification of Italy in 1861. The popular school called âscuola normaleâ arrived in
Sardinia with the school reforms in 1822-1824.
The aim of my paper is to show how and when models, coming from abroad, mixed
with the presence of congregations of teachers, not only Jesuits, who were very
active in the education of the ruling classes, but also Piarists who settled in many
villages, giving life to an efficient school system made up of boarding schools,
seminaries and private teaching posts.
My research is founded on letters sent between: Francesco Cherubini and Antonio
Manunta in the early XIX century. The first translated education books coming from
Austria into Italian and tried to use simultaneous education methodology in a
popular school that he founded in Milan; the second learnt from Cherubini new
didactic models to instruct a maximum number of pupils at the same time and made
many efforts to import them to the island.
My study case is interesting such as a laboratory test: according to me, Sardinia - set
in the middle of Mediterran - is a good point of view to analyze the impact of the
âbeneficialâ virus (popular education) that âcontaminatedâ all Europe from the end
of 18th century
Illiterates and criminals: judgements and prejudices about illiteracy in Sardinia (Italy) from the XIX to the XX century
Fight against illiteracy had inevitably relations with the events that saw the birth of Italy as a
nation in the XIX century. Both the traditional education based on one oral method and the popular
school of the new State had sometimes used different approaches especially in the southern areas
of Italy and in the islands where the imposition of the national curriculum on the local
administration couldnât combine the local culture with the subsistence needs of the community.
Compulsory primary school didnât often start in harmony with the local dialects, the different
cultures and the socio-economic needs. The âcoerciveâ role of the national education didnât help
the people to attend the school especially where the new State wasnât perfectly known
The exemple of Sardinia is somehow emblematic because this island could keep its own identity
although she had known several dominations.
Here the national Italian curriculum (Casati law 1859) was seen worse than Carlo Feliceâs, actually
the second respected the cyclical agrarian calendar, including reading-writing-calculating methods,
plus both an âagrarian catechismâ and a Christian one.
The lack of attention to the shepherds and farmersâ habits caused their absence from the
compulsory school due to the need for rural work, for illnesses, and indigence (sons of widows, ill
parents, lack of clothes and shoes, long distance from the school).
The Stateâs answer to this âdisobedienceâ sometimes explicit but mostly implicit shows the clear
misunderstanding of the local culture.
The census, the survey and their interpretations prove how it was difficult to overcome the simple
correlation - peculiar to positivism - between illiteracy and crime âWhen the number of illiterates
becomes fewer the number of prisoners will diminishâ.
Some intellectuals (ALFREDO NICEFORO, La delinquenza in Sardegna, 1897), considered Sardinia
a criminal area because of the conformation of its inhabitantsâ head.
Illiteracy wasnât a problem to fight at all. On one hand, a lot of soldiers, that died during the first
world war, were from Sardinia and probably their low level of school education with the indigence
made easier their recruitment. On the other hand, a lot of events of delinquency and banditry of the
second world war were justified as acts of cultural backwardness of some inland villages in
Sardinia.
During the fifties, this simplification was changed by some intellectuals that described Sardinia
richer and more problematic in their books (Pigliaru), anthropological research (Pinna), pictures
(De Seta), novels (Giacobbe).
The aim of my work is to explain how success and failure in literacy policy can also depend on
understanding or misunderstanding of the social background by the public administration and
government. When families recognize the importance of school education as a part of the local
culture and as an economic opportunity they will encourage their children to study
Frequency conversion of structured light
We demonstrate the coherent frequency conversion of structured light, optical
beams in which the phase varies in each point of the transverse plane, from the
near infrared (803nm) to the visible (527nm). The frequency conversion process
makes use of sum-frequency generation in a periodically poled lithium niobate
(ppLN) crystal with the help of a 1540-nm Gaussian pump beam. We perform
far-field intensity measurements of the frequency-converted field, and verify
the sought-after transformation of the characteristic intensity and phase
profiles for various input modes. The coherence of the frequency-conversion
process is confirmed using a mode-projection technique with a phase mask and a
single-mode fiber. The presented results could be of great relevance to novel
applications in high-resolution microscopy and quantum information processing
Ultrasensitive interferometric on-chip microscopy of transparent objects
Light microscopes can detect objects through several physical processes, such as scattering, absorption, and reflection. In transparent objects, these mechanisms are often too weak, and interference effects are more suitable to observe the tiny refractive index variations that produce phase shifts. We propose an on-chip microscope design that exploits birefringence in an unconventional geometry. It makes use of two sheared and quasi-overlapped illuminating beams experiencing relative phase shifts when going through the object, and a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor image sensor array to record the resulting interference pattern. Unlike conventional microscopes, the beams are unfocused, leading to a very large field of view (20 mm(2)) and detection volume (more than 0.5 cm(3)), at the expense of lateral resolution. The high axial sensitivity (<1 nm) achieved using a novel phase-shifting interferometric operation makes the proposed device ideal for examining transparent substrates and reading microarrays of biomarkers. This is demonstrated by detecting nanometer-thick surface modulations on glass and single and double protein layers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Electric-field thermally poled optical fibres for quasi-phase-matched second harmonic generation
We report on quasi-phase-matched frequency doubling to the blue in electric-field poled optical fibres. An increase of a factor of ~10 in the conversion efficiency in comparison with the previous results is obtained. Our experiments show that the structure of the induced nonlinear grating is not uniform, both longitudinally and transversely. For this reason the value of the effective nonlinear coefficient is still far from the optimum expected from the measured value, through Maker's oscillation, for a uniformly poled fibre
532nm pumped optical parametric oscillator in bulk periodically poled lithium niobate
We report a quasi-phase-matched optical parametric oscillator pumped by the second harmonic of a single frequency Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. Both the frequency doubling to 532 nm and the parametric oscillation are performed in periodically poled lithium niobate crystals with a nonlinearity of ~15 pm/V. The OPO has been operated in 'singly resonant' and 'doubly resonant' configurations. The threshold in the singly resonant case was ~0.14 J/cm2, more than one order of magnitude below the damage limit. OPO tuning from 945 nm to 1225 nm was achieved by changing both the period of domain reversal (from 6.8 to 6.85”m) and the temperature of the crystal
Mid-infrared Gas Sensing Using Graphene Plasmons Tuned by Reversible Chemical Doping
Highly confined plasmon modes in nanostructured graphene can be used to detect tiny quantities of biological and gas molecules. In biosensing, a specific biomarker can be concentrated close to graphene, where the optical field is enhanced, by using an ad-hoc functional layer (e.g., antibodies). Inspired by this approach, in this paper we exploit the chemical and gas adsorption properties of an ultrathin polymer layer deposited on a nanostructured graphene surface to demonstrate a new gas sensing scheme. A proof-of-concept experiment using polyethylenimine (PEI) that is chemically reactive to CO2 molecules is presented. Upon CO2 adsorption, the sensor optical response changes because of PEI vibrational modes enhancement and shift in plasmon resonance, the latter related to polymer-induced doping of graphene. We show that the change in optical response is reversed during CO2 desorption. The demonstrated limit of detection (LOD) of 390 ppm corresponds to the lowest value detectable in ambient atmosphere, which can be lowered by operating in vacuum. By using specific adsorption polymers, the proposed sensing scheme can be easily extended to other relevant gases, for example, volatile organic compounds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Frequency doubling in Ga:La:S optical glass with microcrystals
Second harmonic generation in gallium-lanthanum-sulphide (Ga:La:S) and GeS2+Ga:La:S glasses is investigated. It is shown that microcrystals of Ga:La:S and of alpha-phase of gallium-sulphide (alpha-Ga2S3), whose presence in the glass matrix is revealed by x-ray diffraction analysis, are responsible for the frequency doubling process
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