Conference Program

According to the voices of the students involved, can an intercultural peer mentoring project foster greater coherence between schools and their democratic and transformative vocation?
This paper presents a case study conducted in a high school located in a public housing neighbourhood on the outskirts of Rome, characterised by significant economic and social hardship. The school, attended by approximately 2000 students across two campuses, is often portrayed as an “island” within the local context because of the academic outcomes achieved by its highest-performing students and its positioning in private agency rankings. At the same time, it is marked by deep contradictions: many students living in the neighbourhood do not reach graduation, and a substantial number of students without Italian citizenship, whose presence is frequently problematised by both teachers and peers, leave school early, in continuity with patterns observed at the national level.

Within this context, following a decision by the collegial bodies and the establishment of an “Intercultural commission”, the school launched an experimental intercultural peer mentoring project. The initiative involves enrolled students in welcoming newly arrived peers, supporting them during the initial phase of school insertion, and listening to their concerns, which are understood as epistemic resources for rethinking school practices, organisational arrangements, and everyday routines. The project aims to make the institution more accessible, dialogical, and responsive to students’ subjectivities, while also addressing school dropout. For the participants, and with broader implications for the institution, the experience constituted a space for personal commitment and for the development of competences necessary for participation in democratic contexts and institutions (Barrett, 2021), thus functioning as a device for learning for democracy.

The study seeks to understand the meanings that young participants attribute to their peer education experiences and the forms their participation takes within an intercultural peer mentoring project. Adopting a perspective attentive to student voice, student participation was examined as a research object in its own right and analysed in light of Fielding’s (2012) patterns of partnership (see also Grion & Cook-Sather, 2013).

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, ethnographically oriented approach (Pastori, 2017), combining observation and self-observation tools based on trifocal grids related to democratic culture competences (the related outcomes are discussed elsewhere) with interviews, logbooks, backtalk, meeting records, and focus groups involving teachers, the project team, school leadership staff, and, most importantly, the young participants. The textual corpus was analysed through Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Pagani, 2020).

The findings show how the project simultaneously functioned as a space for learning democratic competences (learning for democracy) and, under specific organisational and relational conditions, reconfigured participation itself as the organising principle of the educational experience (democracy for learning), while also revealing tensions between symbolic recognition and actual decision-making power, as well as the ambivalent role of adults as both facilitators and gatekeepers of participation.