The Articulation of SWA in Italy: Context, Processes and Outcomes of Scholastic Innovation

This paper aims to analyse the articulation of School-Work Alternance (SWA, thereafter) through the identification of organisational models based on the grade of scholastic innovation, the type of adopted curriculum, and the attributed goals to this measure. These cognitive objectives were reached through the elaboration of data collected by a survey carried on SWA coordinating tutors in 432 upper secondary schools in Italy: first, we built an index of innovation and other indices regarding the organisational processes activated by schools; and we classify the different organizational models of SWA. Our theoretical frame conceives the SWA as a tool of neoliberal reform in education and at the same time as an outcome of reorganisation of scholastic knowledge produced by the social change and connected to the economic tertiarization (Bernstein, 1973, 2000). In this view, the analysis started with the hypothesis that SWA may be implemented through different organisational models according to the manner through which schools (and the scholastic actors) relate with involved partners and depending also on restraints and resources of the local socio-economic context. Our findings show not only the divisions within the scholastic field but also as this measure may lead schools in peripheric contexts to reinvent themselves, going beside the dichotomy between bureaucratic compliance and the enhancing of neoliberal regulation (Bengtsson, 2011). Rather, the combination of some innovative practices and resources seem to return a new centrality to the educational system with regarding its capability to convert the attack to its autonomy in a mean to influence on production world, without giving away the typical values of public education (Apple, 2012; van Dijck et al. 2019), at least according to the vision of European and Italian social model.