The school as a place learning ecosystem – Participatory evaluation of the boundary conditions: the case of the IIS Amaldi.

Abstract

The community pact is a tool potentially capable of fostering the development of place learning ecosystems and communities with a variable territorial size (from an urban district to a city or a region). The realisation of such potential is, however, subjected to an adequate understanding of the boundary conditions, investigated in this paper through a participatory evaluation process. The outcomes of such an evaluation process show that teachers and parents tend to develop different visions of how schools can act as a territorial presidium, although both expect that it is exclusively focused on the needs of the students, rather than those of the territory. The perception of an increased level of school smartness over the last seven years, in fact, has induced a strong sense of belonging to the school community in all the stakeholders – students, teachers, and parents – which has not been accompanied by an equally strong sense of belonging to the territory of reference. The significant increase in the perceived smartness of the learning ecosystem does not seem a sufficient condition, even in the presence of the formal stipulation of a community pact, to push the development of an educating community capable of interacting in a capillary manner with all components of a territory that is characterized by elements of strong degradation. Even the establishment of a territorial presidium having the school as a pole of attraction requires a long work of confrontation, sharing, co-planning, and assumption of co-responsibility to integrate the different points of view emerging from the participatory evaluation process.