Danilo Taglietti

University of Naples "Federico II" / Università di Napoli Federico II, Dipartimento di sociologia, Alumnus

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.

Publication Date: 2021

Publication Name: Enacting and Conceptualizing Educational Leadership within the Mediterranean Region

Research Interests:
Educational Leadership, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Actor Network Theory (ANT), and 2 moreDigital Education and Digital Leadership

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 sociological courses supply is widely differentiated and evaluate the distance between this varied supply and the actual condition of the graduates.