Educational community and common responsibility to foster children's future.

At the end of 2016, Italian government approved an experimental provision to contrast ‘educational poverty’ (n°280/2015 law). Save the Children (2016) defines this phenomenon as the lack of educational opportunities in four areas: to know, to be, to live together and to do. Social entrepreneurs and this NGO promote “common responsibility” between educators and the reinforcement of “educational community” as ideal solutions to contrast it (Save the Children, 2016; Con I Bambini, 2016; 2018). What do these terms mean? Can “common responsibility” and “educational community” be concrete solutions to contrast “educational poverty”? What do they mean on the field, in projects funded by Con I Bambini? These are the main questions for an explorative research (Becchi e Vertecchi, 2003; Dewey, 1951). The theoretical exploration of the topics (educational poverty, common responsibility and educational community) supports the conduction of a holistic case-study (Yin, 2018) about the project “Sulla Buona Strada”, settled in Genoa (Italy). The project involves different actors: families and children; institutional stakeholders; teachers from seven infant schools; social workers; workers of culture. All the project activities aim to improve the connections between citizens and experts. Data collection and interpretation use ethnographical sources (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995), to investigate this case understanding the different meanings on the research’s topics that come from citizens, institutional stakeholders and social workers. The main sources of data are depth interviews and focus group. The contribution aims to present the first findings of this ongoing research, with a specific attention to stress the necessity to conceptualize the topic of “educational poverty” from a pedagogical perspective and to support that with a critical analysis (Saarinen, 2008) about the assumed positive effects of the mentioned provisions. References Becchi E. e Vertecchi B. (2003), Manuale critico della sperimentazione e della ricerca educativa, Franco Angeli, Milano. Con I Bambini - Impresa Sociale (2016), Bando prima infanzia 2016. Con I Bambini - Impresa Sociale in collaboration with DEPP Srl (2018), Povertà educativa. Servizi per l’infanzia e i minori. Report febbraio 2018, Rome. Dewey J. (1951), Le fonti di una scienza dell’educazione, La Nuova Italia, Firenze. Hammersley M. and Atkinson P. (1995), Ethnography principles in practice. Routledge, London - New York. Law n° 208, December 2015, Disposizioni per la formazione del bilancio annuale e pluriennale dello Stato. Saarinen T. (2008). Position of text and discourse analysis in higher education policy research, in: Studies in Higher Education, 33:6, 719-728. Save the children (2016), Ending education and child poverty in Europe, Save the children Europe, Brussels. Yin R. K. (2018), Case study research and applications: design and methods,SAGE, Los Angeles.