WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY - News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA #22: The importance of writing in cursive - Paola Perullo (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Writing is a system of signs and symbols that allows you to transmit
ideas, concepts, and images across time and space. The act of putting
spoken words and still unexpressed ideas into writing, in doing so,
liberates thought and transforms it (1). This is even more true when we
talk about cursive writing, which, unlike block letters, forces you not
to take your hand off the paper. It forces the child to make fine and
complex movements that stimulate logical-linear thinking, thus giving
greater structure and coherence to their ideas. "Writing in italics
means translating the thought into words, writing in capital letters
instead means dividing it into letters, breaking it up. And italics,
just as it binds letters, binds thoughts (2). Furthermore, according to
very recent studies, the drift towards writing on a keyboard or towards
simplified forms of writing, such as block letters, reduces the stimuli
of ideational and linguistic productivity and even slows down reading
comprehension (3).Seeing the difficulties that many children have in
reproducing alphabetic characters, from the graphic point of view, and
also the numbers, one could say that the virtuous continuity between
mental and motor activity, between perception and manual skills, has
been interrupted. Detecting similar trends does not mean rejecting the
opportunities offered by technological development, but reaffirm the
priority of educational choices over market conditions (4).
It involves highlighting the results of research and studies done in the
past, in those years in which attention was paid to the pedagogical
training necessary for teachers involved in the delicate task of working
with children from 0 to 6 years old. This research, which has developed
since the 1990s, has contributed to spreading the idea of a child being
active in the construction of his own knowledge, underlining the central
role of relationships and social interaction in teaching/learning processes.
THE SCROBBING, FROM THE GESTURE TO THE BIRTH OF WRITING
One of the studies that recognized the child's ability to link the first
signs on the paper to thoughts and stories was the one that studied
scribbling, from the gesture to the birth of writing. In common language
the term scribble mostly has a derogatory sense ("it's just a
scribble"). But by listening to the child, we understood that scribbling
is an autonomous way of thinking and seeing, which is specific to the
child and not foreign to the adults that we are. Giving credit to the
doodle means giving credit to the child as our constant interlocutor. In
the first phase the child discovers that well-differentiated visual
traces emerge from certain movements of the marker on the paper and
begins to experiment with them. In the second phase "the attribution of
meaning" occurs and here the child "sees" something that is not the
simple trait, and states it, verbalizing it. In the third phase, defined
as the "Signification Process", images and meaning are joined together
and the scribble becomes a symbolic chain that has its own intimate
coherence. From which, at least two consequences can be deduced: that
the scribble is not a drawing (which organizes a significant set of
shapes), but rather the thread of a path that transforms, from moment to
moment, on that same sheet. Like a film projected on the screen, or like
writing a story, and with many analogies to dreams. Time, therefore, and
not just space, is a constitutive dimension of the scribble, and
therefore the scribble must be understood by moving the observation
methodology, from the product of the child's activity, to the child
himself while he is scribbling. If on the one hand the scribble has
within itself the potential of writing, or rather it is, in certain
aspects, a writing, on the other hand it is also, and tends to become,
figuration. It could be said that if the line, or at least its forward
progression that develops over time, is at the origin of writing, the
circle, or at least that closing of the line on itself in a ring that
circumscribes a two-dimensional space, is the matrix of each figuration.
The scribble, therefore, as at a crossroads, already contains within
itself the paths that will lead, on the one hand to linear writing, and
on the other to figuration. It cannot therefore be considered just the
tool for controlling a child's evolution, but an autonomous way of
seeing and thinking, an unrepeatable style of the boy and girl before
us. The unfolding of visual and motor thought in time and space can
allow the first differentiations, when the adult allows the process of
translation of graphic expression into orality and then, with its
mediation, the emergence of writing .
In the moment of narration, the child progressively conquers a sense of
identity, a sense of identity which obviously does not arise from a
void, but which had already been structuring itself since birth and
finds, in this way, new paths and extensions of itself. . This first
distinction and the development of "composition" skills, both verbal and
graphic, are the basis of future skills, both in autonomous production
and in reading and understanding written texts (5).
The current attention to the importance of handwriting, in particular
cursive, the research that has multiplied on this, with related appeals
from experts in the field, not to neglect learning handwriting,
demonstrates that there are the damage that a market logic, uncritically
transferred to schools, can do is now evident. REHUMANIZING school means
reaffirming the priority of educational choices over market conditions,
to allow the development of the human abilities with which we are gifted
at birth.

Bibliographic notes

1) Angelini,C. Manetti, E 2018
2) https//www.riabilitazioneuropsicomotoria.it/2019/11/14/l
importance-del-corsivo-collegamento-mano-cervello/
3) Natta, F.2016
4) Children and writing Benedetto Vertecchi experiment Nulla Dies Sine Linea
5) The scribble (From gesture to the birth of writing) Fabio Guindani
and Gabriella Romano.
Il Cantiere n. 20 ottobre 2023 ilcantiere@autistici.org

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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