Teaching Innovation Through SWA: From the Neoliberal Model to the School-Centred Model, Inspired to the Capability Approach

The aim of this paper is addressed to how School-Work Alternance (SWA, thereafter) is taking shape in Italy: this measure is still building up and redefined recently. To reach this aim, it is useful to conceive SWA as one of the main measures of «Lifelong Learning», namely the European paradigm reorienting Italian educational policy in the last twenty years. That paradigm connects social inclusion to the transmission of competencies useful to enhance individual skills substantially concerning finding an adequately well-paid job. Based on the application of Bernsteinian perspective (Bernstein, 1973, 1977, 2000), this paper shows the findings of a survey carried on a sample of upper- secondary schools in Italy, whose SWA coordinating tutor were interviewed. Through multivariate analysis applied on factors concerning scholar and territorial context, pedagogical innovation, networking practices (between school and extra-curricular organizations), findings show the bivalent nature of SWA: alternative experiences seem emerge, beside the diffusion of practices connected to the educational neoliberal model or to its rejection. These alternative experiences seem to point out how schools may arrange their relationship with local companies and social organizations, creating an educational model following the vision of capability approach in some way (Sen, 2000; Nussbaum, 2011), in turn connectable to the analysis of what Bernstein calls «pedagogic rights» (Bernstein, 2001; McLean et al., 2013).