Valley future

Teacher Laura

I found myself in this school in the mountains a bit by chance, at the age of twenty-four. We were in the midst of a pandemic, I still had to graduate and they offered me a nine-hour teaching position at Casatta. Nobody wanted it. It was my first teaching job.

In college, I studied theory, methods, psychology and pedagogy, at Casatta I learned what it means to educate, what it means to help someone grow.

During my first year, we had ten children. There was a single multi-grade class that united first, second and third grade. There was no one in fourth and fifth grade.

It was a difficult time for the Valfloriana school. They wanted to close it. The children I teach, however, come down from the mountains every morning, from Montalbiano, Dorà, Barcatta, Villaggio, Sicina, Casanova, Valle, Pradel… They leave shortly after seven, because the minibus goes all the way around the valley, up and down the hairpin bends up to the highest houses. Keeping this school alive is worth the survival of an entire community.

After graduation, they called me back immediately: this time it was for a tenured position, distributed between Casatta and Capriana, another tiny village in Val di Fiemme, perched atop the mountains.

I learned to calibrate activities and materials designed for twenty or thirty children to my two or three students, I built games, invented songs. I spend my afternoons preparing lessons, then in the morning I get to school and am ready to change all my plans based on the situation: programmes are fundamental and we also work a lot on notions, but considering the state of mind of the person in front of me allows me to achieve better results.Here there is the possibility of establishing relationships, of identifying specific paths to the needs of each person, without losing sight of teamwork.

At the good citizen school

In Casatta we do activities with Alpine troops and firefighters, we go to the mountains, we plan projects with the children to protect the territory, and then they themselves carry them forward. We built the school garden with the help of farmers. Students designed and made it. They sow and care for the shoots until June, and, in the summer, families take turns watering the plants and, in autumn, there is the harvest… and what a harvest!

In Capriana this year we are learning to work with wood and, on certain days, the whole school smells of Swiss pine and fir, and shavings fly on desks and in our hair.

I feel good here and I feel like I’m really making a difference.

Every time I tell someone that I teach in Casatta and Capriana, people look at me as if I told them that I go all the way to Peru. People are surprised by the existence of such small schools and, above all, by the fact that they can be not only strongholds of resistance to depopulation, but also true models of a lived education. There are difficulties, no doubt, and there is no shortage of challenges, but what matters is that, here, boys and girls are aware of their role as protagonists in making things work.

Every morning, when I open the little wooden doors of the classrooms and enter this world of books and elves, I become more and more convinced that these places that resist silent among the woods and in the valleys, are not small mountain schools, but big life laboratories.