Thesis title: NONOSTANTE i RICHIAMI. Le pratiche disciplinari nella scuola.
Scholars have long and consistently documented how discipline practices in schools affect the social quality of the educational environment and, as a consequence, emotional cognitive and behavioral student engagement. Since the early 1990s fear of school violence has driven the American Public Education toward increasingly punitive and exclusionary methods of school discipline that have been defined by scholars as zero tolerance policies. Three decades of extensive research on this topic afterwards have raised serious questions about effectiveness and equity of these practices: ubiquitous disparate rates of exclusionary discipline across schools reflect students’ racial, ethnic, disability disparities (Gregory & Skiba, 2019). Researchers have documented some of the potential harms of these exclusionary school discipline practices for students, including academic difficulties, dropout, increased misconduct, and juvenile justice system involvement (the school to prison pipeline phenomenon). This research explores the way in which Italy has similarly passed legislation to increase the use of exclusionary discipline and examines how discipline reforms have changed the schools’ environment with special focus on the Italian Technical and Vocational schools, mainly attended by the poorest, multiethnic sectors of the society. Moving from the theories developed over three decades of extensive American research on zero tolerance policies and practices, this research analyzes Italian Schools in order to document the extent to which the American Zero Tolerance paradigm fits the Italian context. Quantitative and qualitative grounded research data developed within three Italian Technical and Vocational Secondary Schools throughout two years support the inquiry. The author argues that the Italian secondary schools are currently implementing the Zero Tolerance approach and addresses reasons and consequences of this occurrence. In an era of educational policy defined by accountability, it is astounding to find a widely implemented practice or policy that has demonstrated, through sound research, to be counterproductive. The study interprets the implementation of these policies in Italian schools as an expression, adaptation, and reinforcement of broader fears and political-economic changes that emerged in the US thirty years ago and are now emerging in Italian society, affecting the mandate of public schools.
The text is divided into two parts. The first section is devoted to the theoretical foundations (scientific literature and school regulations), while the second is devoted to the empirical part of the research (case study, questionnaires, and focus groups).