Danilo Taglietti

In this paper, we aim to present and discuss the results of a research whose objective was to map some of the new relational spaces and policy subjects of educational policy making in the Italian context. Following subjects and objects that have been involved in the ‘doing and undoing’ of the most recent Italian school digitalization policies, La Buona Scuola and the Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale, we have (re)constructed, on one of the most famous professional social networks, part of the ‘mobile’ interactions that shape the network of national educational policies.

In the last two decades, the Italian education system has lived a season of endless reforms. NPM as a globalising discourse and its ideas and tools have played out a relevant role. This article tries to propose a dynamic reading of both the transformations and the role played by NPM's discourse and tools. As analytical starting points we adopt the construction of three policy problematisations and the related solutions, that concern: a) the governance of the Education system; b) the evaluation of its quality; and c) the regulation of its professionals. These policy problematisations are interpreted as the entry-points of NPM and the core of the modernising process of the Italian education system. To sum up, these assembling processes have enacted conflicting practices and tensions towards: a) the creation of quasi-markets in the field of education; b) the recasting of the relationship between the state, schools, professionals and publics according to a rational-goal and neo-mana...

Abstract This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor representationalist but genuinely other than the modernist discourse with which the discipline began and grew up. The paper begins with a brief historiography of sociology in order to broach the relationship between Deleuze and Foucault, and then focuses on Deleuze’s book on Foucault as a means of moving ‘from the archive to the diagram’ and to a topology of ‘thinking otherwise’. Finally, the paper moves to reformulate a new vocabulary no longer anchored in modernist categories to a non-dialectical reconfiguration of explanation and comprehension.

Our work consists of a secondary data analysis of Sociological (LM-88) Masters Syllabi displayed in MIUR dedicated website (http://www.universitaly.it). For each course, we regrouped the available data in two main dimensions: the first is inherent the structure of the formative paths of students and graduates; the second one is inherent the Syllabi “promises”, regarding the prospected acquisition of cognitive and professional competencies. We choose to work on textual data in order to achieve two different goals. First of all, we can outline recurrent semantic areas through a lexicometric analysis. Then, we will be able to discuss the relations between the above-mentioned dimensions, pointing out the distance between the promises and the existing structure. We think that this approach will be helpful to light up what is often ignored in the evaluation of master degrees, namely the content of official syllabi. We appreciate this analytical perspective because it shows how the sociolo...

This article deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a point of acceleration for the emergence of a distinctive and yet unstable problematization of the 20th-century school form. Focusing on the Italian public and policy debate on education and adopting an archaeological analytics, it explores what ‘other’ coordinates for the forms of schooling are emerging through the encounters, clashes and co-options between different epistemological standpoints. Mapping the knowledge production about the space(s), time(s) and subjectivity(/ies) of schooling, we discuss the emergence of a problematization of the school form articulated around the concept of ‘blending’ and unfolding around a distinctive set of organizing dualisms: developmentalizing/securing, normalization/pluralization and individual/population. We offer a preliminary sketch of the contours and tensions that constitute the epistemic space where this problematization unfolded. First, we show how medical, economic, digital and educatio...

In a Foucauldian perspective, our work consists of an archaeological analysis of the last education reform policy of the Italian Government: the socalled “La Buona Scuola” reform. We assume that policies are discourses which exercise power through a production of truth and knowledge. We try to build up an “archaeological tool” for the analysis of policy texts, in order to light up the regimes of visibility and enunciability through which new truths are produced. Then, we use it to analyze the “La Buona Scuola” policy. Deconstructing its texts, we see how they try to produce relevant changes in the truths of the Italian education system. First of all, we will discover the marketization of the italian politics, through the merging of administrative and commercial aspects in the authoral function. Secondly, we will find the manufacturing of a new teacher’s subjectivity, market-oriented and commodfied. Thirdly, we will see the slipping of purposes of the whole system by the re-interpret...

The aim of this work is to address the shaping processes of subjectivation through the exploration of spaces, times, technologies and subjectivities involved in the Futura event, organized by MIUR to promote the National Plan for Digital School (PNSD) policy in January 2018. We look at it as a “policy event”: a «microdispositif of power» strongly connected to the PNSD as a «macro-formation of policy». In the contribution, we articulate the thick description of the event – gathered through observation in notes and ethnographic materials (especially visual materials) – starting from four epistemological dimensions: spaces, times, technologies and subjectivities. These dimensions are further detailed in specific sub-dimensions: social connoted / technological connoted spaces; orientation / value of times; technological practice / speech; and subjectified / autonomous subjectivities. In conclusion, we argue that the observation and analysis of the Futura micro-dispositif allows us to sh...

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis ...

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology–one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor representationalist but genuinely other than the modernist discourse with which the discipline began and grew up. The paper begins with a brief historiography of sociology in order to broach the relationship between Deleuze and Foucault, and then focuses on Deleuze’s book on Foucault as a means of moving ‘from the archive to the diagram’ and to a topology of ‘thinking otherwise’. Finally, the paper moves to reformulate a new vocabulary no longer anchored in modernist categories to a non-dialectical reconfiguration of explanation and comprehension.

Contemporary governments are, nowadays, actually concerned about the need to reform educational systems in order to improve their performance. In most countries a state of perpetual educational reform (Adamson, Astrand and Darling-Hammond 2016) is the result of the interplay between local politics and the pressures of data-driven international comparisons, the demands of international institutions and agencies, and the increasing circulation of a distinctive set of policy recipes to modernise education. Key travelling ideas in the global education reform mantra are that leadership matters (Harris et al. 2013), and 'good' leadership has a direct impact on educational outcomes. A 'Transnational Leadership Package' spreads the conjunction between the promotion of policy anxiety and the provision of policy solutions which promote the best way to do leadership (Gunter 2014). Through international frameworks and national regulations head teachers are more and more conceived as educational leaders and particularly as key levers for improvement. Relatedly, it is possible to observe a 'standardisation of and normalization as to what constitutes good leadership' (Thomson, Gunter and Blackmore 2014 : ix). Within this scenario, this chapter analyses the redesign of the head teacher in the Italian education system that has occurred in the last two decades of educational reform. Our aim is, on the one hand, to show how such a redesign finds its space of possibility in a distinctive problematisation of both the welfarist traits of the Italian education system and bureau-professionalism as organisa-tional arrangement (Grimaldi, Landri and Serpieri 2016). On the other hand, we employ Foucault's archaeological method to grasp the way in which the head teacher is remade as subject within a process of objectification (Foucault 2002) that develops through a set of discursive practices and finds its crystallisation in the 2015 ' La Buona Scuola ' [The Good School] Reform Act (hereafter BS).

In a Foucauldian perspective, our work consists of an archaeological analysis of the last education reform policy of the Italian Government: the so-called “La Buona Scuola” reform. We assume that policies are discourses which exercise power through a production of truth and knowledge. We try to build up an “archaeological tool” for the analysis of policy texts, in order to light up the regimes of visibility and enunciability through which new truths are produced. Then, we use it to analyze the “La Buona Scuola” policy. Deconstructing its texts, we see how they try to produce relevant changes in the truths of the Italian education system. First of all, we will discover the marketization of the italian politics, through the merging of administrative and commercial aspects in the authoral function. Secondly, we will find the manufacturing of a new teacher’s subjectivity, market-oriented and commodfied. Thirdly, we will see the slipping of purposes of the whole system by the re-interpretation of the relations among the education, the right to labour and the citizenship. At the end of the analysis, we will determine the formation of new discursive strategies and light up the fields of possible options that the policy realizes.

The conditions of the Italian Public Administration are becoming everyday more critical. The current debate on the reform of the State is often based on solutions that have already been implemented in other countries, not considering that these countries, even if more prepared, are facing similar problems. The main intention is to propose a different global point of view, based on policy rather than politics. If we analyse deeply the crisis that concerns the Administrative State, it is possible to spot the reasons in the constitution of society and in its continuous internal changes. We will try to figure out an useful and flexible interpretation tool: a matrix for policies. We will discuss several potential applications related to the current debate about alternative forms of governance and, finally, we will point our attention to Experimentalist and Democratic Governance.

In this chapter, we will focus on the digital turn in educational leadership in Italy. After a long-lasting period when educational reforms were oriented to introduce methodologies, tools and practices from the New Public Management (Grimaldi, Landri, & Serpieri, 2016), there has been recently a decisive turn towards the introduction of ‘The Digital’ as the new molar agency (Deleuze, 1988) around which educational practices are organized. Educational leadership does not get out of this tendency and has again become a privileged object of government reforms. By drawing on ANT and Foucauld- ian perspectives, our work envisages tracing how the New Public Management and the digital turn are reshaping practices of educational leadership and management. The chapter is based on an extensive set of empirical researches on education reform (Grimaldi & Barzanò, 2014; Grimaldi, Landri, & Serpieri, 2016; Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2013; Serpieri, 2013) and recent investigations on the introduction and the impact of the digital governance of education in Italy.