Conference Program

What is the purpose of education?

The answer to this question can go in very different directions, and mostly depends on the context an educational effort is engrained into and the goals it pursues, explicitly and implicitly. Defining a context and the sets of goals pursued there is also not an easy task. For sure the context - whatever metaphysics characterises it - influences education greatly.

The opposite is also true, just less seen: education influences the context, mostly in the effort - in some cases consciously, in some probably not - of reproducing or consolidating it.

Authors like John Dewey, those of the so-called "Frankfurter Schule" and Martha Nussbaum centred many of their reflections on understanding and describing these peculiar dynamics.

This contribution to this panel aims to illustrate a pedagogical practice developed on one assumption: Democracies are not a given, and their constitutions are perishable products of history if the promises of equality of opportunities for every citizen and therefore of freedom - both positive and negative - made at their origins are not taken seriously.

There are many factors that play a significant role in whether the foundational promise of equality, freedom and justice are kept or not, and to what degree. Education is one of these factors, and it can and should do more to make democracies and their promises attainable and sustainable. This is the reason why promoting equity of opportunities, justice, is key.

Promoting educational justice in disadvantaged contexts is the mission of Teach For Italy. The practice I'll be presenting was designed and implemented to help the classrooms where Teach For Italy fellows teach in being places that foster student leadership, well-being and inclusion, while centering on "Student Voice" as one of the elements that constitute a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning system.

A Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning system that has the peculiarity of being an instrument for collecting data (quantitative and qualitative evidence) generated by students, as well as their parents and teachers, which serves the principle of a collective hermeneutic circle. All involved stakeholders are actively participating not just in the process of generating data, but also - and equally essentially - in interpreting them, making sense of them for the purpose of enhancing dialogue, sense of belonging, reflection, wellbeing - advanced citizenry capabilities.

The paper ultimately argues that longitudinal data acquire democratic value when they enable institutions to recognize patterns of inequality, deliberate collectively about their meaning, and act intentionally to transform them. In this sense, tracing inequalities becomes a concrete pathway toward fostering democratic education.