Planning paths of school success in Italian multicultural secondary school

The present study, Social-Justice-Education oriented, intends to identify meaningful ways in which all students of foreign origin can be supported to achieve academic success. Academic achievement of students of foreign origin is one of the major challenges of contemporary intercultural education. Despite policies of inclusion, international and national surveys show that students from first or second generation immigrant backgrounds tend to perform at lower levels than their native peers. Intercultural education tends to understate the very issue of social equality. However, education could play an important role in promoting effective paths towards equity. A shift from Intercultural Education to a more extensive vision of Social Justice Education becomes a necessary step in this direction. I adopted a two-phase mixed-method design quant->QUAL (QUAL emphasized), consistent with the “Sequential Explanatory design” (Creswell, 2007), in which the quantitative data analysis of the first phase becomes the background for the second qualitative phase, a critical Grounded Theory Method (GTM) in its constructivist approach. The first phase is related to 1,325 students of foreign origin in the second year of secondary school in the Province of Trento, with a post-hoc descriptive reconstruction back to 6 years, highlighting the pedagogical predictors of the pattern of school success. The second phase includes open and focused observations (82 hours) in 5 middle schools, 28 recorded semi-structured interviews (19 hours) to key-informants (principals and teachers), questionnaires and document analysis. According to the GTM procedures, all the material was transformed into text, transcribed verbatim and encoded using QSR NVivo10. Inhomogeneous patterns of the school careers (269) of the students of foreign origin are clearly revealed, as are training channeling and sterile projects which often fail to promote academic success. Among the 7 built categories by GTM, effective strategic planning emerges as core-category, directly related to the congruent local policies, to the suitable evaluation of trajectories and to flexible teaching approaches, with the creation of meaningful relationships with students. In particular, the emerging multidimensional model and the 6 steps of an effective process could be relevant for planning paths of school success for all.