School-Family Relationship: from the Crisis Experience to Sharing Practices

Political, cultural and economic transformations that characterize the contemporary society impact the school, significantly. Therefore, as John Dewey stated, school is the educational institution that reproduces, in a simplified form, the issues qualifying the related social context in which it operates. Changes, within the current scenario, modify the teaching-learning experiences, the interactions between the generations, just like all the interactive relationships between school and family. These relationships, in particular, have become really critic and, in fact, it needs considerable pedagogical attention, if we want to promote a real educational partnership. The need for a shared strategy, between school and family, is not a recent phenomenon, but it represents a need that has always been essential, since these two experiences act significantly, within the child’s life. However, while this partnership assumed a specific configuration, till few years ago, that did not create particular problems, now it seems to get into a crisis. Starting from these premises, the paper purpose is to highlight both critical points, over the relationship between school and family, within the Italian context, and the strategies that can be selected to face the tensions, often generated when these two different educational realities touch each other. The paper will refer specifically to an action-research, carried out in two schools of Bergamo, a city in Northern Italy, as a part of the project named “Listening to promote. From the school of autonomy to the inclusive one: the quality of the school experience. Action-research on the inclusive school”. The paper will first present the context of the project and its theoretical and methodological framework, then it will analyze the main issues, recognized by teachers, as the critical aspects of the current relationship with families and, finally, it will identify those strategies able to allow us in starting a new cooperation between school and family. Starting from the results of the research, it will be emphasized, on one hand, the importance for the school to be fully aware of its pedagogical identity, in order to communicate in a more efficient way with the students’ parents, and on the other hand, to recognize value and supervise the social and material contexts in which school gets in touch with the families, in order to make them some real sharing spaces.