The City of Jobs in a middle school of Italian Switzerland: an ethnographic approach resulting from a social action. The contours of a breach to an equitable middle school (original) (raw)

2018, Summary of the thesis

The City of Jobs organizes a series of learning situations related to educational and vocational guidance for students of the establishment of Cadenazzo-Vira Gambarogno, a popular middle school in the Italian part of Switzerland. Throughout the four years of middle school, unique, as in France, pupils are invited to confront with personalities from the world of work, to visit companies and professional schools, to carry out a brief research in the computer room, to watch a feature film and to participate in a symposium on the evolution of work, or, to take an optional course in initiation into lexicon and economic language. Research studies this pedagogical project as a focal point, that is a center towards which converge a set of complex social processes, related to the building dynamics of the unique middle school. Carrying an effective social diversity, this one can merely be thought of in close relation with a changing world of work, in search of new balances. This work comes from a decennial social action, between 2003/2004 and 2013/2014, which became an ethnographic research carried out by one of the animators, around thirty semi-structured interviews, fully transcribed and translated into French, with middle school professionals, pupils' parents, invited personalities and students who animated the project. These data are supplemented by others, especially from available archival documents, assessment reports made by students after visits and articles published in a cultural weekly magazine, allowing the analysis of an experience through the construction of a case study. The first part of this study focuses on the relationship between collaboration and conflictuality in the elaboration process of the City of Jobs. A strategic analysis of the active minority highlights a structure of power relations centered around a triangular game between social actors, leading to a continuous oscillation between a dynamic of autonomous innovation, of heterogeneous innovation and reflexive slowdown. The second part analyzes the role of educational engineering in the efficiency of its daily progress. A desirability analysis of the implemented learning situations shows a differentiated responsible participation of students in learning, favouring the succession of the vocational sequence and the construction of a transitional competence, able to guide the transitions of life of these individualities under construction. The third part, finally, examines the repercussions on the identity form of the students. A structural analysis of the life stories of the most engaged students sketches an identity transformation which shows the appearance of a spirit of performance, with individualized variations, which reinforces the control of life transitions. This plural approach brings out the contours of a breach towards the realization of a truly unique middle school, because equitable, result of a fragile balance constantly renewed between freedom and equality, first of all at the level of the hidden curriculum. What makes awakened individuality arise, potential fruit of the emerging ideal-type of the democratic teacher. Simultaneously, these contours reveal the limits of this process of internal rejuvenation of the republican school, namely the weakness of the elaboration of a vision of the social world of the teaching staff, vector of this dynamic, and the unavoidable extension of the equity of the school universe to the world of work, within the framework of the emergence of an open society. ethnographic approach-middle school-pedagogical project-vocational guidance