Ciao a tutti,

I am an art teacher who is (possibly) writing my Master's thesis about art education in Italy. I am interested in what very young children learn about art/cultures, particularly about their own Italian culture when making art.

*At what level is there a special teacher to teach art, called the "art teacher"? (or something else?)
*What is taught regarding design, clay, or painting, and what do children make?
*When do children learn about Italian (or other) cultures, such as da Vinci, etc.?

Any help according to elementary, middle and high school levels is appreciated, possibly from someone in Italy, as I am looking for the most current information. I hope to also find a teacher in Italy that I can communicate with (I am fluent). Thanks for your help!

Mille grazie,
Nicoletta

This may vary from region to region and from private to public school, but in Southern Lazio I can say there is nothing I'd consider art education in 1st grade. In first grade the kids did a lot of drawing (trying to copy pictures from their reading book and coloring them in) but nothing creative. It was used as an activity when some students finished their real work (reading/writing) before others.

I saw no "art" being done in 2nd grade, but we were only here for 3 months of that grade.

In 3rd grade so far my son was given a xerox paper of a drawing and told to color it using dots. He did, but then later thought the paper wasn't important as he didn't have a notebook to attach it to... His impression was that it was just a time-filler.

Sorry to disappoint! Art instruction must start somewhere, maybe Middle School when music instruction starts? There are probably private tuition opportunities to study art too, especially in the bigger towns and cities, I would imagine.

I have no personal experience with art in schools, but I have a friend here who is a teacher (elementary) who is very interested in this. She is a great artist herself and also a musician and we've had some interesting discussions about teaching kids through other media (ie art or music as opposed to rote). If you want to leave your email address, I can give it to my friend so she can contact you.

I am 36 and Italian.
All through the five years of elementary school (6-11) we had no art teacher: our single teacher taught all subjects. Art in primary school was pretty much limited to making drawings and similar projects. In the last couple of years, our teacher did some art teaching probably out of her own initiative, asking us to qwrite essays inspired to various paintings, while some more hints were provided by visits she organized to a few museums in Milano.
In the three years of middle school (11-14) we had an "educazione artistica" teacher (3 hours per week divided in two lessons), who mainly had us produce individual jobs based on a very limite study of various forms of art. We mainly drew and painted, though we did some stuff with imitation-mosaic and a few other techniques, which never included sculpture and architecture.
I went to an unusual, sperimental high school (14-19) where the studies were clearly divided in two "sets" of respectively 2 and 3 years: durint the first two years we were following undifferentiated courses, while in the following three years each student would chose an area of expertise. For the first two years, I had a basic tuituion of graphics (4 hours per week divided in two lessons), which included tasks like redrawing the packaging of a product of your choice: it was more design-oriented than art-oriented, but included some hints on architecture. For the alst three years, I picked a linguistic specialization and no more art studies were planned.

Thank you so much for your input, everyone. I will keep exploring this topic, as it seems education varies from place to place in Italy. I wonder if there are regional curricula followed along with a national curriculum?

Nicoletta
e-mail: nicolettart@yahoo.com