Practicing diverse curricula. Education for what? Voices from Naples

The Italian education system is nowadays witnessing a clash of discourses that implies different policy agendas, educational aims and social values. Within this scenario, the last decade has seen the prevailing of a hybrid discourse combining the neoliberal emphasis on the production of human capital and a third way-like compromise between social equity and economic competitiveness. The curriculum setting is one of the field where such a clash is more evident thanks also to the ambivalent pendulum between delegation to school autonomy and recurrent centralisation. This work analyzes the practicing of different curricula in a school labelled as ‘failing’ and involved in a local government pilot policy aiming at improving its performances. The data were collected through documentary analysis of policy documents, schools’ curriculum planning, observations, in-depth interviews with teachers and experts involved in the pilot policy. The materials have been analyzed through a coding and sub-coding process, using the software NVivo 8. Using foucauldian discourses as heuristic devices, the paper shows how those curricula are shaped by the enactment of different set of values and purposes concerning citizenship, social and economic education. The work highlights how some of the curricula enacted by teachers are well-suited to match the students’ needs in terms of care, emotional well-being and citizenship education with the provision of the requirements for entering into the labour market. On the contrary, the pilot policy enacted to improve their school performances forces the teachers to adopt a standardised curriculum that results mainly inpired by an economic rationale. The policy constructs the student as a deficit and does not recognize the reflexive engagement of the teachers with the dilemmas of contemporary education.