Rethinking education: A case study in the field of popular and second-chance schools

The globally widespread phenomenon of school drop-out poses challenges that question the education system, which often fails to guarantee everyone the right to education and increases inequalities acting as a device of social reproduction. To work towards social justice in education, within an emancipatory framework intertwining educational practice and critical perspective, research must be able to connect the global dimension with local actions, triggering a recursive exchange leading to a transformation of learning processes and school contexts. This goal gave rise to the need to explore in depth the contextual variables that the literature identifies as factors causing drop-out, studying with an systemic perspective the model underlying forms of education, between formal and non-formal, that stand as an alternative to the dominant educational system, such as popular and second-chance schools. This contribution presents the results of an intrinsic case study carried out during the s.y. 2020/2021 at the Popular School managed by the “Antonia Vita” Association in Monza, which welcomes students aged between 13 and 17 severely disadvantaged. The analysis, conducted according to the methodology of constructivist grounded theory, focused on 20 participant observations and 40 non-directive and semistructured interviews, involving different social actors inside and outside the School. The results first of all outline the Popular School model, characterised by strong educational supervision, greater flexibility, dynamism and support than the traditional school, the individualisation of the students’ learning paths and the low numerical ratio between educator/teacher and pupils, which makes it possible to follow the individual student closely without “letting him or her get lost”. The school thus presents many structural differences with respect to the traditional school system, first and foremost the centrality accorded to the figure of the educator, who plays a supporting role on several levels. The results thus invite reflection on the fragilities of the public education system, from which certain training needs in particular emerge in the socio-educational sphere. Furthermore, the results outline an initial deconstruction and resemantisation of the concept of “drop-out” in the light of that of “functioning”, proper to the bio-psychosocial model. The school is also configured as a paradoxical example of inclusion: in fact, the idea emerges that in order to pursue the objective of greater equity and justice in the school environment, there is sometimes a need to envisage alternative and highly individualised paths, which contrast with a canonical pathway to which experiences of exclusion and difficulty are linked.