The symposium, which is open to scholars from throughout the world, is explicitly designed to allow as broad and in-depth a comparison as possible between different researchers’ experience. Its aim is to trigger an international debate on the school exercise book and its uses, in relation to a history of schooling seen as a history of the ethos and practice of education, embracing the history of teaching, literacy and writing, while at the same time addressing the issue from the standpoint of a history of dominant ideologies and of the perceptions of the players involved in school life (pedagogues, teachers and pupils).

The exercise book (quaderno, schulheft, cahier, cuaderno, caderno, tetrad’) is an extremely complex source offering a variety of levels of interpretation, lying as it does on the borderline between several different disciplines: the history of pedagogy and teaching, the history of illustration and publishing, the social history of childhood, linguistics and cultural anthropology. Thus papers for submission may hail from a broad variety of disciplines as long as they focus on the exercise book and children’s writing; in other words, these two factors need to be the primary sources around which the rest of the paper is built.

The Scientific Committee is particularly eager to encourage young research students in this field to submit their work and to apply for a grant to cover expenses incurred in attending the symposium.

Prof. Roberto Sani, Rettorato, Piaggia dell’Università 11, 62100 Macerata, Italy.