Italo-American Trajectories of the Reception of Dewey’s Educational Philosophy

Against the backdrop of the flourishing literature on the influence of John Dewey’s work all over the world, this paper engages with the reception of his ideas in the Italian context. After reconstructing this reception in general, the paper zooms in on two case studies, one in the 1920s-1930s and the other situated in the last months of World War II and in the period immediately afterwards. These case studies, on the one hand, at the level of the history of education, offer the opportunity to reconstruct three different configurations within which the reading/uptake of Dewey’s theories occurred in Italian culture; and, on the other, at a more theoretical level, they lead to the elaboration of a specific interpretive tool – the notion of ‘geographies of the encounter’, an idea not without Deweyan overtones – that can be deployed in the exploration of Dewey’s traveling philosophy of education.