Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces "Beware: Children," an action-research exhibition held in Italy (2003-2022), showing 150 global street signs. It explores how anthropology is learned in educational contexts where the exhibit also served as an arena for ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on participatory action research in anthropology of education. It discusses the ethnographic case of the exhibit “Beware: Children”, held in eighty-six primary and secondary schools in Italy between 2003 and 2022.

“Beware: children” refers to the street signs found near school buildings designed to warn drivers to slow down and proceed with caution. This article focuses on what can be learned when street signs of this type, used in different countries and continents, are examined and analysed in depth. Featuring 150 images referencing the “Beware: children” sign, the exhibition takes a cross-cultural approach and adheres to a pedagogical itinerary informed by the critical observation of images.

The paper questions how anthropology is learned in education contexts, contexts in which the exhibition also functioned as an arena for ethnographic research. Participants, including children, educators, and guides, generated their own explanations of their educational influences. “Beware: children” was not devised as a group of images to be viewed, however, but rather as a workshop in which visitors could interact with the object-images and investigate the extent to which reality can lie ‘behind’ a single street sign.