Cultivating Imaginative Education in South Tyrol

Mark Fettes and Gillian Judson

Simon Fraser University, Canada

It’s not every day that someone defends a PhD thesis in Imaginative Education—and receives his degree summa cum laude, no less. That was one of the highlights of our one-week visit to northeastern Italy, hosted by the MultiLab team in the Faculty of Education, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen. It was a packed week—many thousands of steps walked each day, many schools visited, many talks and workshops given! Yet it would likely not have come about, had not Alessandro Gelmi—the PhD student in question—spent the last three years doing a deep dive into the theory and practice of IE.

Many CIRCE collaborators in the Vancouver area will recall Alessandro’s stay with us from November 2022 to March 2023, when he conducted numerous interviews as part of the research for his dissertation. Since then, with the support of prof. Federico Corni, the head of MultiLab, and other colleagues including Carla Cardinaletti and Barbara Caprara, Alessandro has gradually been building a small IE community of practice in a number of Italian-speaking schools in Bolzano. It was rewarding to be present (Mark as a co-supervisor, Gillian as an examiner) for the final stage of this significant work. The resulting thesis, (Re)Discovering the Art of Teaching: Teacher Professional Development through the lenses of Imaginative Education, is original and insightful in many respects.

Image: Alessandro Gemi, PhD defence, Bressanone, March 25, 2025

Before and after Alessandro’s defence, much else was going on. Early in the visit, we were able to have some good discussions with the MultiLab team. Federico’s close collaborator Hans Fuchs, a retired Swiss professor of physics who has long been a champion of Kieran Egan’s educational theory, joined us for the initial conversations, and two graduate students, Federica Ansaloni and Chiara Puecher, were part of our two-hour workshop focusing on deeping the concepts of cognitive tools and kinds of understanding. We also worked with two groups of pre-service teachers, in a class on citizenship education and another on creativity. The latter was particularly fun, as we made it quite interactive and ended up taking them outside to discover wonder in a local green space.

School visits were a big part of the week—three on Monday, two more on Wednesday, plus some time spent with children and teachers in a local nature spot. We got some intriguing glimpses into Italian early childhood education, with its strong emphasis on play and creative exploration, and learned some important things about teachers and schools in South Tyrol. The province has separate Italian and German-language school systems with very little crossover. All our visits were on the Italian side, and only to preschools and elementary schools. At the secondary level, teachers are not required to have any specific training, only a university degree… a situation which predictably leads to a lot of stand-and-deliver pedagogy. Our conversations with the primary teachers, however, felt very similar to those we might have with teachers at home.

Image: Visiting an outdoor school space in Bolzano, South Tyrol

Encouraged and guided by Alessandro, seven of the teachers were presenting at a conference on teacher development organized by CRESPI, the Centro di ricerca educativa Interuniversitario sulla professionalità dell’insegnante (Interuniversity Centre for Research on Teacher Professionalism) at the University of Bologna. Thus on Thursday we hauled ourselves off to the train station at 6 a.m, so we could make it to Bologna by mid-morning and spend a delightful few hours in the ancient city centre before our scheduled keynote at the conference opening session. By the time we got our turn, the poor audience members had been sitting still for two hours, so the first thing we did was to get them to stand up and stretch! After that, they proved quite receptive to a talk that mentioned such curious things as rhythms and patterns, heroic qualities, and mystery.

Image: Federico Corni, Mark Fettes, Gillian Judson introduce the CRESPI keynote; interpretation by Alessandro Gelmi (right)

We closed out the week with a final trip to Bolzano, where we met with a number of school leaders including the head of the Italian school system in South Tyrol, Vincenzo Gulotta. After some positive talk about the work the IE teachers have been doing, Gillian gave a well-honed pitch for the importance of imagination in school leadership. Her metaphors of soil and growth clearly struck a chord with Mr Gulotta, and overall we were left with an impression of great growth potential for IE in the coming years. MultiLab wiill be exploring the possibilities in the coming months, including perhaps more of a deliberate focus on leadership, both with the teachers and with school principals and superintendents. 

Experiential highlights of the visit included walks amongst the vineyard-covered hills and visits to former monasteries, delightful encounters with Tyrolean and Italian cuisine (including Federico’s own home-aged balsamic vinegar), a beautiful hotel with origins in the 17th century (now elegantly renovated), and many animated and laughter-filled conversations. We boarded the train back to Munich with full hearts.