Formazione & Insegnamento (May 2022)
Towards the Transformation of Social Justice Theories in Education: The students’ Voice of Second Chance Popular Schools
Abstract
The paper starts from the critique of the concept of sustainable development, moving towards a perspective of social eco-development in line with the democratic demands and Bronfenbrenner’s theory of the ecology of human development. The cornerstone of this transformative perspective is an idea of regenerated social justice, which refers to the model of Nussbaum’s capability approach to embrace a theoretical framework of Social Justice Education based on the theories and practice of Cochran-Smith. Starting from the concept of recognition and inspired by both a pedagogical and a political approach, a qualitative research was undertaken according to a participatory paradigm guided by the idea of giving voice to the most marginalized social groups. Therefore, this research (which is part of a larger project that covered the entire s.y. 2020/2021) has adopted the Student Voice approach, to listen to the voice of students in conditions of educational risk or school drop-out in the context of second chance popular schools, regarding their representations on education and teaching-and-learning, their experiences and the meanings they attribute to school. Between June and July 2021, at the “Antonia Vita” Popular School in Monza, 8 semi-structured interviews were conducted with students aged between 14 and 17 years old, transcribed literally and then analyzed with the software ATLAS.ti, according to the methodology of socio-constructivist Grounded Theory. In the concluding part, the paper then analyzes and discusses the emerging categories and their codes, which induce a reflection on the pedagogical model of the Italian public education system.
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