ERASMUS + ... WIDENING HORIZONS IN ITALY!

Guest blog written by:
Raffaela Basile, Teacher at Istituto Comprensivo Altopascia, Italy
(translated from Italian to English using Google Translate)

In Italy the educational landscape has become extremely complex. The territorial horizon of the school widens. Each specific territory has links with the various areas of the world and thereby constitutes a microcosm that reproduces opportunities, interactions, tensions and global coexistence on a local scale. Even every single person, in his daily experience, must take into account more and more heterogeneous information and confront the plurality of cultures. In his formative and existential journey the student finds himself interacting with different cultures, without however having suitable tools to understand and relate them to his own. A variety of cultures and languages ​​have entered the school. Interculture is already today the model that allows all children and young people mutual recognition and identity of each. The school successfully collects a universal challenge, of openness to the world, of the practice of equality in the recognition of differences. The presence of children and adolescents with different cultural roots is now a structural phenomenon and can no longer be considered episodic: it must become an opportunity for everyone. The education system must train citizens able to consciously participate in the construction of larger and more composite communities, be they national, European or global. The Italian school has the task of educating to coexistence through the enhancement of the different identities and cultural roots of each student. Furthermore, our school must train Italian citizens who are at the same time citizens of Europe and the world.

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In the institute there is a high number of students with non-Italian citizenship which corresponds to 25% of the members, almost all of the second generation. New immigrants have a strong need for socio-cultural insertion and sometimes have economic disadvantages:

They are often unskilled labor that is employed for a fixed term, sometimes forced into undeclared work and/or subjected to the exploitation of work by third parties. While up to 2008-2009 foreign residents had substantially unemployment rates similar to those of the Italian population, in subsequent years they have suffered a sharp deterioration in their relative position mainly due to the fort crisis that has hit construction and some sectors of business services (eg transport and logistics) with a high concentration of immigrant labor, above all male. The socio-economic cultural level of the pupils' family context is low. The economic situation of families is very critical and is aggravated by the economic crisis of recent years. Therefore, difficulties related to inclusion are highlighted much more complex levels of literacy. There are social groups coming from particular realities (obligatory stays, etc.). Integration and coexistence between the different cultures present in the territory is not always easy, also due to a certain loss of identity on the part of the population. Situations of socio-cultural hardship, deviance phenomena, such as the petty crime and hooliganism are not absent from this territory: per this reason it has been identified as an "area at risk". The fact that the Comprehensive Institute of Altopascio is the only school reality present in the territory it facilitates the planning of an integrated territorial training offer, in close collaboration with the municipal administration. This offer includes the planning and organization of extracurricular activities, even in the afternoon, collaboration with voluntary and private associations.

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Thanks to the project "In Others' Shoes" we discovered the real value of interculture. Through the philosophy of children and global education we have discovered a new way to approach diversity, making us increasingly aware of its cultural richness. Furthermore, by teaching children to see things from another perspective, perhaps even the less probable one, we were able to develop in them a greater empathic capacity, an ever wider development of critical thinking and creative thinking and a greater capacity for problem solving. Thanks to the activities of "In others' shoes" we have learned to build respect for others, mutual help and collaboration. By developing empathy we have discovered that the feelings, values and needs of others are as important as ours. Furthermore, the experience of collaboration with fellow partners has been for us teachers an enrichment both from a cultural, professional and personal standpoint. Experience has allowed us to become better teachers, more attentive to different cultures, significantly widening our horizons.

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