Alumnado de nacionalidad extranjera y necesidades educativas especiales en la escuela italiana

Laburpena

The main theme of this thesis is the presence of “students of foreign nationality” within the school population with “special educational needs” and its possible overrepresentation in this segment throughout the Italian educational system. The work starts with several basic questions: What impact does migration have on the school system? Who are the pupils considered to be of foreign nationality and the immigrant pupils? Who are the subjects with "special educational needs" at school? Why does Italian legislation include foreign students in this category? Whom are the ministerial texts referring to? Does the introduction of such a "label" represent a way of managing diversity by producing differences? Above all, is there a real disproportion in the presence of students with a migration history within the group of students with special needs? The thesis aims to answer these questions through an ethnographic study carried out in several educational institutions in a town in Southern Italy. The fieldwork includes contacts with local education authorities and analysis of legislation on this issue. The results appear under the form of a compendium of publications, incorporating five scientific texts, written and published in different periods (a book chapter and four articles, one of which is under review). The order of their presentation, which does not correspond to the order of their publication or creation, makes it possible to identify the trajectory of the research process. The introduction, which contains the presentation, the theoretical object, the objectives and the methodology used, is followed by a compendium that begins with the text entitled “Scolarizzazione in Italia e popolazione di nazionalità straniera”, submitted to the journal Studi Emigrazione. This text was written with the aim of recording and describing, in quantitative terms, the presence of foreign students in Italian schools, including those defined as students "with special educational needs” and comparing their presence with the general evolution of schooling in Italy in the last few years. This was achieved by using data sources belonging to two Governmental institutions: the “Istituto Nazionale di Statistica” and the statistics reports of the “Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca”. In this article, we have focused on three fundamental aspects: the evolution of the presence of foreign students, the differences according to educational levels and the unequal territorial distribution. The following text named “La sobrerrepresentación de escolares de nacionalidad extranjera en el grupo de alumnado con necesidades educativas especiales”, was published in 2018 in the Revista Internacional de Estudios Migratorios. It shows the ethnographic fieldwork carried out in order to present the speeches of a group of teachers and technical educational specialists on who the subjects of "special education" are. The aim is to investigate whether or not the above-mentioned overrepresentation occurs. The article titled “Normativa italiana sobre la delimitación de escolares con necesidades educativas especiales y su relación con la población de nacionalidad extranjera”, –published in the Revista de Derecho Migratorio y Extranjería–, on the one hand, focuses on school and its way of looking after students with "special educational needs". On the other, it focuses on the increasingly significant presence of foreign pupils at school in general and within that specific group in particular. In order to correlate the two themes, it presents the Italian legislation defining "special educational needs" and the position of foreign students in this context. The fourth and fifth texts, published in 2019 and 2018, analyses the representations of a group of school professionals interviewed during our field camp; at the same time, they provide some reflections on the usefulness of using the "special educational needs" label as a way of managing diversity. Every single text forming part of the compendium of publications gradually presents the conclusions of the work. The final section of the thesis provides a series of final reflections that summarizes and groups them by thematic axes, showing possible new ways of working for future research.