"From occupation to participation": student voice and reflections on how to rethink high school experience, centered on relationship, student’s engagement and school's educational dimension

In the last few months, Italy experienced a wave of student protests ever seen in decades. Thousands of high school students descended into streets and squares and occupied schools across the country to demand more investments in public schools and better access to education. The protests represented a culmination of students' discontent pushed to a breaking point by the devastating COVID-19 crisis and the policies adopted by the government to face it, leading to school closures and months of remote education. Those measures - albeit necessary to contain the pandemic - had severely impacted students' mental health and exacerbated already existent fragilities of the Italian school system, making the need for profound and systemic change even more evident. This contribution illustrates how this need is also strongly felt by students – central actors, yet often unheard, of the school scene. The qualitative study, set within a phenomenological framework, involved 36 students from ten high schools in Lombardy in a reflection on the school system, starting from their own experience of occupying their school. Students were involved in focus group interviews aimed at eliciting their opinions and fostering a comparison between different perspectives. The results highlight how the reasons behind students’ protests go beyond the structural or didactic reorganization of the school experience. Rather, the participants underline the need to recognize the invaluable role of school - as a place imbued with relationships and a training ground for democratic citizenship - in their formation as individuals and citizens, and argue for a greater investment in students’ active participation and engagement in their classrooms, schools and overall communities.