Effetto palla di neve: la riforma universitaria e la nascita dei corsi di laurea in Antropologia a Roma

The introduction of the new educational system, with its Learning Agreements (which require Undergraduate Courses to provide instruction and require teachers provide students with mentoring), its Program Descriptions (which set out the professional qualifications and employment outcomes which each program aims to provide), and its ministerial charts and their credits (which, through the new composition of the former and the modification of the latter, attempt to make good on the promises of the program descriptions), has resulted in various transformations: - The change to the new system (3+2): this Copernican revolution has radically modified structures, ways of living university spaces and criteria for the acquisition of knowledge. It has transformed what was a specialized major (for graduates with degrees in Philosophy, Humanities, or Sociology), into a basic discipline (currently there are 700 students enrolled in the first-level degree program, and 200 enrolled in the second level degree program); - Teaching and research have been tightly bound to the ministerial grids, and to the logic of credits. The scientific pursuit of knowledge has been squeezed between academic/bureaucratic and economic levels. - The introduction of specialized courses has brought to prominence the figure of the anthropologist, who previously remained obscured in the recesses of a generic degree. - Teachers have been forced to confront new and urgent challenges: organization of degree programs, drafting of plans of study, and duties of management and monitoring. - The new courses have permitted the students to feel much earlier on that they belong to a scholarly community, to see themselves as participants in a common endeavor, to critically engage with theoretical and research-related developments in their field , and also (encouraged by their apprenticeship experience) to ask questions about future employment. The introduction of the university reform has had a “snowball effect” on the Department of Anthropology of the University of Rome. The department has moved from a predominantly academic and self-referential context to that which Nowotny has called agorà (2001: 23), that is, an open, negotiable, conflicted space. The reform has broken the old academic organizational scheme and has opened this space to new subjects and new interests: teachers, students, companies, NGOs, social cooperatives, and government agencies. In this new context, how has the reform been implemented in the Anthropology Department at the University of Rome? What are the transformations that the reform has caused in the way in which teaching is conceived, in the organization of the undergraduate degree program, in the perspectives of the discipline? What changes have occured in the understanding of the roles of teachers and students? What changes have occured in the way in which teachers and students interrogate the space of the university? By closely observing the practices of teachers and students, by listening to and analyzing the narratives they produce, which make sense of the university experience and render it objective, I attempt to grasp how the university reform has been negotiated with local traditions, how the idea of anthrolopogy (its boundaries, its theoretical prospectives, its methodological baggage) has changed in accordance with its configurations, both academic and non-academic. In analyzing these perspectives and trajectories, I make use of the “community of practice” concept of Lave and Wenger.