Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates the process of constructing the self and the other in a field-work experience. In analysing some storified excerpts from the author's ethno-graphic notes, the concepts of narratives, small culture formation and the intercul-tural are applied. Narratives and small cultures can be used to rethink the role of the researcher, as they permit focusing on the observation as a process of narrative construction. Additionally, it is based on small cultures involving both the re-searcher and the participants that this process takes shape. The concept of the in-tercultural, as applied to this work, aims to challenge the essentialist, established view of culture in its association with national belonging to focus on the negotia-tion of meanings that construct culture. What the author finds is that in these ne-gotiations, each social actor engages with a set of personal narratives that come into play according to contextual needs and their resonances with other participants.

In this article we present quantitative data collected in Italy for the CHILD-UP project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme in the period 2019–2022.

The aim of this work is to focus on a specific topic which emerged during the analysis of the questionnaires collected within schools. This topic is the perceptions of professionals and parents on the issues of integration, cultural differences and the intercultural.

Starting from a theorization of these concepts, we focus on quantitative data collected in the first part of the project by means of questionnaires distributed in a number of schools in Modena, Reggio Emilia and Genova. These questionnaires were given to professionals, students, and parents in kindergartens, primary schools and lower and higher secondary schools. However, here we only focus on data collected from professionals and parents.

This data shows how participants express ambivalence and disorientation concerning representations of hybridization, celebration of cultural differences, understanding of problems related to intercultural differences and assimilation. Moreover, significant differences exist between professionals (teachers, mediators and social workers) and between professionals and parents, who seem more frequently interested in assimilation.

There is a complex relationship between the essentialist and non-essentialist discourses that respectively fail to and succeed in recognising the potential for participation which the children of migrants bring with them into new cultural settings. These competing discourses curl around each other within the structures of educational settings and within all the people involved, including the children themselves. A yin-yang framework helps us to see the nature of this entwined relationship and the hybridity which is the key to untangling it. It helps researchers to understand that getting to the bottom of what is going on is not straightforward and requires that they reassess who they are and how they should proceed. Sometimes it takes unusual and unexpected circumstances, such as those brought about by the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic to shake their thinking-as-usual and to see the unexpected.