Colonial school culture: teaching in indigenous schools in Libya

Abstract

This essay reconstructs the school culture overseas by analysing the work carried out by teachers at the vocational school in Tripoli and the industrial school in Benghazi. The methodology used is inspired by the heuristic suggestions developed by Nóvoa (2009) to understand how synergies, or disconnections, operate between different discourses, languages, histories and times in creating new communities. The article aims to verify the presence of these hybrid spaces within colonial school culture. The objective, therefore, is to explore the oscillating relationship between repulsion and integration, functional to the regime’s projects, that existed between Italian teachers and the colonial context in which they operated.