Although Italian legislation has provided for varying forms of pupil representation in school councils and committees and on different levels of the local and national education system, these do not necessarily imply authentic, meaningful participation by young people in decision-making processes of any importance nor that anyone important will necessarily listen to anything meaningful they might express.

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That is why many of the young people who engaged in the 10-day online forum event set up by the International Relations Department of the Italian Ministry of Education to raise awareness on a number of crucial issues related to students’ learning experiences said they were authentically surprised that anyone “up there” could be concerned with what they had to say.

Within a year-long and nationwide project aiming to raise awareness in schools and Italian society at large on the 2010 EU agenda, a group of young people working with a team of teacher-advisors seconded to the Ministry created, managed and performed in an array of “meaningful opportunities” leading them and thousands of other adolescents to investigate what an open learning environment entailed for them and why many of their peers had dropped out of school, what role they imagined in the future for their teachers and what common aspirations young learners across Europe might share.

These young people came from schools across the country and, apart from a core of 5 or 6 steady participants, constituted a rotating think tank and task force numbering between 6 and 60 engaged in building, running and supporting different project activities. They were also the main players or “Euroactors”, as some of them called themselves, on the scene of the EU-2010 awareness-raising campaign. The scope, breadth and quality of their engagement were not “pre-envisioned” as it were by the adults, but simply emerged along the way from the sheer strength of the convictions and ideas the young people put forward. They took part in project meetings with Ministry staff and practitioners, observing them and feeding back their views on the work the adults had accomplished. They animated online fora and discussions, designed and realised campaign materials, produced and presented videos, co-managed workshops, participated in focus groups and gave large public presentations illustrating their work. They screened the hundreds of pages of bitter considerations and of hopeful dreams on school and learning environments coming from the fora and picked out key quotes and situations they knitted together into a powerful play they performed to an audience comprising the Education Minister and regional policy makers. They used all of this input to draft a  Manifesto for and by Young European Learners (http://www.europa-2010.eu/) calling upon young people and adults alike to respond concretely to a series of commitments towards making learning a worthwhile lifelong experience. And all of this remarkably took place within the folds of an organization (a ministry) that is generally high in rhetoric.

To conclude, let us consider what Giuseppe – an initially shy and stuttering lad from a school in very challenging circumstances in the Naples area taking part in the project – emblematically achieved as a result of his participation. His actions may bear witness to the idea that democracy needs to be primarly an authentic form of shared experience if it is to be a form of government, whether at school or in Parliament. Tired of reading the waves of sensationalist headlines and articles attacking schools that appear to be a popular journalistic sport, Giuseppe wrote a resounding email to one of the country’s main newspapers, entitled “The School that is” (La scuola che c’è), which sparked an unbelievable surge of public interest in what schools can and do achieve, in spite of all the difficulties they face. Giuseppe was then interviewed by many newspapers and invited to present his views to the Minister himself. A few weeks later, “The School that is” became the official motto launching the first large Ministry initiative providing all schools with the opportunity to show and celebrate their successes on the web. Unfortunately, we must also add that no public credits to Giuseppe appeared for this on the Ministry site.   

Francesca Brotto is a school head and teacher educator formerly seconded to the International Relations Department of the Italian Ministry of Education. In the UK, she has collaborated with the University of Cambridge and Canterbury Christ Church University College.

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