Orientamento cooperativo: dalle storie di vita al sistema orientante

The paper presents a cooperative, narrative and systemic approach to life/career design and guidance, here addressed to professionals of education, and namely to teachers and school managers. This approach is here illustrated through the presentation of a cooperative inquiry, that involved a network of secondary schools (first and second degree) in the geographic area North East of Milano and Province from April 2015 to September 2016. The project’s title was OSA (an acronym for Orientating oneself and each other within the Learning System), a word that also means in Italian “to dare”, since the whole proposal wanted to be an invitation for participants to innovate their practices through a deep and dialogic transformation of their commonsense representations and implicit/explicit perspectives about choice, uncertainty, adaptation, and identity building. The Italian school, in fact, tends to offer a lot of information to students about their future career, and asks them to be ready to adapt to the job market, and to social demands, but very few occasions are offered to develop self-reflexivity, critical thinking and awareness of the larger context, that are nonetheless needed in order to freely make a deliberate choice. The project’s methodology was based on sharing stories of (dis)orientation, to foster critical analysis of life/career design and guidance practices brought forth by schools and to develop awareness of the influence of the wider context. Education to life/career design and guidance is education to the art of improvising a life, a necessary competence in times of rapid change, and besides in a world that is living a major crisis. Furthermore, the emphasis on individuals, as separated from their systems of interactions, and the dominance of linear functional thinking, do not help to see the complexity of life. A systemic approach should take care of the individual student’s capacity for transformative learning, and as well of his/her transforming relationships, especially those with relevant adults (teachers, parents, educators) and how they are connected with the dynamics of larger systems (the school system, the local and regional territory, culture and media, etc.). During the 18 months of the project, several meetings were realized in schools, some of them involving all the participants together (even comprising a final dissemination conference), while more specific and focused meetings were brought forth by subgroups: 3 of them composed by teachers from different schools of the same area and 1 group of school managers, and all of them also involving, as facilitators, the educators and researchers from the group FROGS (education and research on life/career design and guidance in groups and systems), based in Milano Bicocca University and coordinated by prof. Laura Formenti. This group is made by researchers and professionals in education who share a common approach to education and life/career design and guidance, that is a cooperative, narrative and systemic model for both research and intervention. Their method entails working with narratives and images that give a form to human experience, and using these stories to celebrate differences within a certain group of participants. Hence, stories become the basis for reflexivity about perspectives: in fact, a group is made by different people, and when they share stories of (dis)orientation, as it was the case during the OSA project, many different and contrasting ideas emerge. Disorientation and uncertainty were elicited by the method, and took the form of dilemmas emerging from conversations among the participant teachers, school managers, educators and researchers. New dialogic perspectives were hence developed, as well as the capacity to welcome dilemmas and uncertainties about the future, as a way to cope with complexity. This project is an example of how education can ally with narrative and cooperative research to foster reciprocal and reflexive learning about life and career design and guidance.