Conference Program

This paper examines learning difficulties in lower-secondary schooling in Naples through a sociological critique of “ordinary inclusion” in the Italian context. Taking school dropout and formative failure as indicators of system-level barriers, it asks how educational institutions recognise, organise, and allocate support in settings where vulnerability is widespread rather than exceptional. It also considers whether Montessori and other child-centred pedagogies can materialise within the classificatory structures of Italian integrazione, or whether they too risk being absorbed into compensatory logics that limit democratic participation to those officially recognised as “included.”

The paper argues that many difficulties that emerge in everyday classrooms are not adequately captured by the prevailing grammar of identification, compensation, and individualised response that underpins SEND/BES procedures and the much-celebrated integrazione scolastica (Marsili, Morganti, & Signorelli, 2021). Drawing on Slee’s (2021) critique of how inclusive education can remain structurally tied to classificatory logics, the paper foregrounds a broader field of socially shaped educational need: difficulties of attention, literacy, motivation, participation, and emotional regulation that are patterned by socio-spatial inequality yet only partially legible through formal categories. Support is typically activated only after bureaucratic recognition, leaving large zones of vulnerability pedagogically unmanaged or informally absorbed by school professionals and local actors.

Empirically, the paper draws on thematic analysis of interviews with a secondary school teacher, a school principal, a community educator, and a social worker working across three boroughs with contrasting socio-economic and demographic profiles. Despite this territorial variation, the material converges on diffuse learning difficulties, fragile or delegating family support, discontinuous and politicised services, and the growing role of schools and Third Sector organisations as compensatory infrastructures of care and mediation. These convergences suggest that educational vulnerability in Naples cannot be reduced to a single marginal neighbourhood or institutional setting, but recurs across contrasting urban contexts through mechanisms of under-support, service discontinuity, and uneven access to help.

From this perspective, ordinary inclusion appears less as an environmental transformation than as a selective distribution of exceptions to those who cross thresholds of recognisability. Although framed through the language of rights, it remains tied to classificatory practices and compensatory interventions that individualise need without reconfiguring either the classroom or the wider ecology in which schools operate. The more educational vulnerability diffuses, the more schools are required to compensate through informal commitment, overstretched practitioners, and territorially uneven arrangements rather than through proportionate and durable structures of support.

Treating Naples not as a local anomaly but as an urban lens, the paper shows how socio-spatial inequality shapes both the limits of current inclusive arrangements and the conditions under which democratic pedagogy becomes thinkable and practicable. In this respect, Montessori pedagogy offers an important point of contrast: mixed-age groupings, prepared environments, and relational practices embed participation and support in the ordinary design of schooling rather than granting them only after formal recognition (Lillard, 2005; Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006). The paper, therefore, asks what institutional, spatial, and territorial barriers prevent such democratic arrangements from becoming ordinary rather than exceptional in Italian schooling.