Conference Program
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D.13. The Multidimensionality of Educational Poverty on the Lives of Children Living Outside Their Birth Families. A Focus on Protective Factors (2/2) Location: Edificio ex Tumminelli (C007): Aula 14 Convenor(s): Alessia Tabacchi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy); Anna Guerrieri (Coordinamento Care – Coordinamento delle Associazioni Familiari adottive e affidatarie, Italy) | |
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Everyday School Practices as Risk and Protective Factors for Students Living Outside Their Birth Families: Self-Determination, Narrative Privacy and Inclusive Teaching 1: Coordinamento CARE, Italy; 2: Inapp, Italy Recent studies on educational poverty highlight its multidimensional nature, showing how exclusion may arise not only from socio-economic disadvantage but also from school practices that limit participation, recognition, and agency. This paper focuses on children living outside their birth families, with particular reference to pupils who have been adopted, and analyses how ordinary school routines may function either as risk factors or as protective conditions for their well-being and educational inclusion. The contribution adopts the recent Italian guidelines on the right to education of adopted students as a conceptual and normative framework and develops a conceptual–argumentative analysis grounded in inclusive pedagogy, adoption studies, and research on identity and self-determination. The paper examines the role of micro-devices embedded in everyday teaching practices — such as assignments, classroom rituals, language use, textbooks, and information-sharing procedures — which often rely on implicit assumptions about family continuity and personal biography. When not intentionally designed, these practices may generate specific risks, including non-consensual biographical disclosure, symbolic marginalization, and reduced participation, thus contributing to forms of educational poverty linked to lack of recognition and limited control over one’s own narrative. To interpret these dynamics, the paper mobilizes the concepts of self-determination and self-identification as key protective factors in school contexts. From this perspective, inclusion requires that students retain the right to decide whether, when, and how to share personal information and to define the terms through which their family history is represented in school life. The paper proposes an organizational repositioning of teaching practices based on four operational principles: By reframing everyday teaching as an organizational responsibility, the study argues that inclusive micro-practices can act as protective factors against educational poverty, supporting agency, belonging, and identity development for children whose life trajectories include adoption, foster care, or other forms of out-of-home care. | |