The contribution aims at introducing some points to reflect on the new role which university museums of schools and education can play today in the wake of current international processes of revitalisation of university heritage and museums, particularly in the light of the new objectives of the University Third Mission. Starting from the experience of the "Paolo and Ornella Ricca" School Museum in Macerata University, the authors illustrate how university museums can achieve several goals: on the one hand, to foster the opening up of the universities and academic research towards civil society, and the dissemination of the results of the most innovative historical-educational research; on the other hand, to promote the meaning and the value of the educational heritage as a collective cultural asset able to give participation and knowledge; finally, to make the historical-educational disciplines more valuable as a specialised knowledge which, through such heritage, can express a new specificity and a more active role within academic community.
This work focuses on teachers' memories and intend to dwell on the heuristic potential of this source category, comparing it with the traditional sources of theoretical-regulatory and educational type. After a presentation on the state of art of historical and historical-educational studies on teachers' memories, it will offer an overview of the different kinds of memories preserved in the centres of documentation and research of historical and educational interest, examining the books and documentary heritage of the Centre for documentation and research on the history of schoolbooks and children's literature of Macerata University. Finally, through the analysis of a case study, the Memorie (Memoirs) of the teacher and pedagogist Lorenzo Bettini (1855-1917), we will offer an exemplification of a possible integrated use of sources, for a plural reconstruction of teachers' history.
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