Do the CPIA’s educational programs and teaching re-produce social inequality?

During the last ten years the development of new and intensive migration flows has impacted on the Italian everyday school life. On the one hand it is possible to outline the absence of valid, continual and consistent political actions aimed to guide schools (and in particular teachers) in order to facilitate the social and linguistic integration of these new members of the society. On the other hand, the Italian school system (made by people who everyday work in schools and for schools) and the loyalty of some volunteering associations have given an important contribution to this process of integration. This sudden change of our society brought to teachers and educators’ attention sets of problems that they would have never taken into consideration before. Every level of education (from the primary school to the university) has run into new stimulating, and sometimes not easy to manage, situations. Paying attention to secondary schools and the CPIA (Centro Provinciale per l'Istruzione degli Adulti), it is clear how teachers had to face new students ‘profiles that in the past were not conceivable. In fact, being literacy and schooling always taken for granted, the insertion of quite a large number of illiterate students has been something unforeseen and difficult to approach. In this context, all the educative and didactic projects had to be rethought and reconsidered. This session will focus on the analysis of the teaching and the didactic practices used during the courses of Italian as a foreign language held by CPIA called “Percorsi di alfabetizzazione e apprendimento della lingua italiana”. We must underline the central role that language classes can have in migrants’ life. These moments of schooling do not just represent an occasion to improve language fluency, they can also help migrants to develop social and intercultural skills that will make them feel better in the hosting society. In addition, as these classes prepare students for the exam by which foreigners have to prove they have reached a certain level of proficiency in the language of the host country, it is clear their importance. On this basis, this session aims to analyse in which measure migrants, and in particular the ones who don´t have basics of literacy, can be considered disadvantaged. My reflections are based on my experience as a teacher of the CPIA n.3 in Nuoro during the school year 2017/2018 and on data collected from several CPIA. I will critically evaluate if the CPIA’s education program is able to integrate migrant adult learners or if it put them, especially the illiterate ones, in disadvantage. Reasoning on this fact, we will try to understand if the metaphor of “les initiès”, employed by Piet Van Avarmaet of the Ghent University in his recent studies concerning integration, citizenship policies and social inequality and inspired to Hugus Draelants’ research on the role of school in social reproduction, can be used to describe and explain the outcomes of CPIA’s educational programs and measure their validity.