From Margins to Adult Education Centers. Insights from a Research on Active Citizenship Education with Female Migrant Students

While the current debate highlights the signals of an increasing civic deficit in contemporary societies (Blais & Dobrzynska, 1998; Putnam, 2000) and in Italy as well (Santerini, 2020), new forms of active citizenship are beginning to be detected. These are often implemented by citizens at the margins of the mainstream expressions of citizenship (such us youth, minorities, migrants and women) (Zani & Barrett, 2012) and less visible in the public sphere. At the same time, they have the potential to contribute to renew the constructs of citizenship and active citizenship education from an intercultural, processual and transformative perspective (Banks, 2017; Lazzarini, 2018). CPIAs (Provincial Centers for Adult Education) are formal adult education institutions in Italy. They appear today as particularly heterogeneous contexts (Colombo & Scardigno, 2019; Floreancig et al., 2018) with a school population characterized by superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007). The promotion of civic education is explicitly included among CPIAs aims (Ministero dell’Istruzione, 2020), although their teachers struggle to deal with the complexity of their multicultural classes and to promptly innovate their methods and approaches to citizenship and active citizenship education. The contribution presents a study that was carried out in a CPIA inside a multicultural neighborhood of Milan (Italy) as part of a wider project called Abitare insieme (Italian for ‘Living together’) (AMIF 3477). The research was inscribed within a qualitative paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011), adopting the methodological framework of participatory research to enhance reflexivity and transformative practices (Bove, 2009). Within the project, an innovative intervention of active citizenship education was experimented within the CPIA. The study was based on data gathered through interviews conducted with female students with migratory background involved in the project and qualitative observations of their participation in the intervention. The interviews were fully transcribed, while observation diaries were drafted. Afterwards, data were coded with the aid of a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software and analysed through a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2008). The results show how CPIA migrant female students express peculiar ways of conceiving citizenship and active citizenship that are often invisible in their daily-life contexts – included CPIAs. At the same time, CPIAs appear as key sites to promote and meanwhile to renew the concept of citizenship in a more inclusive perspective, but this requires a specific attention to enhance the experiences of “lived” citizenship (Kallio et al., 2020) that all the students make between school and extra-school and between local and global dimensions. In conclusion, based on the study, it would be possible to provide orienting criteria for the development of new approaches and methods to encourage active citizenship in adult education sector, with specific attention to migrant women’s engagement.