Conference Program

In Italy, school population is increasingly reflecting and amplifying the unequal distribution of population across urban areas, particularly with regard to ethnic composition. School segregation has therefore emerged as an issue of scientific and political debate, guiding local policies, interventions and innovative educational programs focused on combating educational disadvantages or attracting white, middle-class families.

Rarely has the very definition of the problem been questioned, nor how it may contribute to reinforcing a negative representation of schools considered to be segregated.

The present study is part of an ongoing action research aimed at addressing the so-defined condition of segregation in five comprehensive school institutes located in the Turin northern area. This district has the highest share of non-Italian residents in the city and it’s linked in public discourse to images of urban decay and insecurity. Schools located here suffer from the territorial stigma associated with the neighbourhood, compounded by the specific stigma of being schools mainly attended by pupils with a migrant background, “frontier schools”, considered to be of lesser quality and unsuitable for native Italian students.

Drawing on an emancipatory social science perspective, the action research employed a community-based approach that integrated participatory methodologies; the voices of those living these school contexts were foregrounded, with the aim of eliciting their definitions of the situation and supporting a process of collaborative knowledge production.

The research combined in-depth interviews and focus groups with principals and teachers, participant observation, and participatory workshops conducted within Communities of Practice to investigate their representations of the marginalised position they occupy within the Turin school system and the symbolic resources through which this position is negotiated and contested. The label and framing of segregated schools as a problem is rejected by school actors, along with the countermeasures that typically follow from it. From schooling daily practice, a self-representation emerges that conflicts with the external narrative: moving from a deficit-based to a strength-based view, multilingualism, intercultural communication and life skills become resources to be enhanced both in school practice and narrative, asserting their social relevance. These counter-narratives were articulated in the “Manifesto for an Intercultural and International School”, the result of collective reflection carried out in the Communities of Practice. Here, alternative values and principles are translated into actions aimed at supporting intercultural teaching, fostering global citizenship competences, strengthening pupils’ voice and agency and promoting the certification of non-EU languages. By mobilising the framework of internationality, schools' practical and symbolic resources seek to gain legitimacy in the public discourse, overturning the hierarchy to which they are currently confined.

In this process of recognition, however, students in intercultural and international schools keep clashing with a standardised system of knowledge and skills assessment, which continues to disadvantage their life paths.