Cross the line, weave a story - The search for oral traditions through tales and meetings at the border
This project aims at providing students with the opportunity to get acquainted with and discover common cultural roots of this cross-border area where different cultures coexist, by contributing in person to the drawing up of a didactic course. The main theme of the project consists in connecting a series of events to social entertainment and the organisation of several leisure opportunities, with particular emphasis on fairy tales, habits and customs that characterise the various phases of a person’s life. In order to better understand these research elements and analyse their peculiarities participants study the written sources on the various subjects. This work is further enriched by a search on-site, starting from the family environment to expand to complex social contexts (children, youth, adults, elderly). The project intends to identify and bring to the fore a connection among the elements detected in the tales and the events that mark the passages in the life of every individual. The attention of the young researchers will focus on the identification of moral teachings and the psychological traits of the characters. Also, they try to pinpoint the tales that offer different ways of representing a certain occurrence, in order to identify elements that are shared by various cultures and different geographical areas. The project also gives the students the opportunity to put in place an articulated research that requires their active participation in the definition of their study areas, the identification of adequate research tools, the drawing up of criteria for the purpose of comparison and the production of a single paper containing a critical evaluation on the work performed.