In cerca di una scuola adulta. Esperienze educative dalla frontiera Sud d’Europa – In search of an adult school. Educational experiences from the Southern border of Europe
Clelia Bartoli - cleliabartoli@libero.it
Triggered by the social transformations, mainly caused by the recent migrations, and as a result of the new legislation (Presidential Decree no. 263/2012) that recently came into force, the role of adult education in Italy is in an enormous change. This is especially the case of the Provincial Centres for Adult Instruction (CPIA) in Sicily, which nowadays are providing an educational reception system to the migrants, mainly teenagers and young adults, who have succeeded in crossing the Mediterranean Sea. In this light, the CPIAs have a great potential to become a major educational workshop centre where their results and best practices could be shared and taken as example and followed by other school sectors. The following text will deal with three questions that are common to many educational settings, but which in particular apply to the Sicilian one, namely: How is one to work with a group of students who vastly differs from one another? How is one to overcome ethnocentrism? How is one to encompass the concept of «citizenship quotient»? In order to highlight this still little known public education system, the theoretical part will turn to some short stories of the daily life in a school for adults, located at the South border of Europe.