A Letter from the European Union: Reassembling Education in Times of Crisis in Italy

Financial crisis, the stagnation of outlook for the economic growth in Eurozone, the difficulties in implementation of the lifelong-learning in EU and all over the world despite the efforts of redesigning a complex strategy to rethinking education (EU Commission, 2012), the dominant and in some way single-minded orientation of educational policies in the neo-liberal agenda are triggering complex transformations in educational practices and policies. Crisis is shaping the conditions making possible educational practice, i.e. it is affecting the performance of educational practices, and, in more subtle way, the constitutive rules of what is intended for 'education'. In this latter respect, some scholars are imagining an overall effect of reduction, that is the confining of education in the discourse and the practice of learning (Biesta, 2006), while others are noticing complex changes that point, and look to prefigure - suffice to view those concerning the massive changes regard the circulation of knowledge and information - unexpected restructuring of educational practice and policies partly crossing traditional boundaries (transnational vs national; public versus private). This paper will try to develop an understanding of these changes (the depth, and also their relative reversibility), by proposing a reading that escapes from methodological nationalism, and the related vocabularies (Dale,and Robertson 2009). A way to develop this reading is to distance from the trap of comparative models of education, and to reflect on the condition of education in times of crisis within a socio-material approach of educational practice and policy (Fenwick and Edwards, 2011; Fenwick and Landri, 2012). This theoretical displacement implies to investigate to what extent the crisis has an effect in educational practice, and in particular, to what extent the activation of educational policies in response to economic, or financial downturn is threatening socio-material assemblages in education, and/or if the crisis if supporting, favoring, or preparing novel reassembling of education. Here, socio-material assemblages of education policy include complex intersections among academic, professional, and political worlds. Methodologically, the paper will investigate socio-material assemblages to understand how practices are interconnected in ecologies of educational practice (Kemmis et alii, 2012), and to comprehend if, and how the crisis is locally translated, and is acting on the conditions that define and make possible educational practices. Accordingly, we will investigate: how the crisis is perceived (is a threat? An opportunity?) in educational discourse? In particular, how do policy-makers respond to the crisis in educational policies? How instead researchers, and epistemic communities do include economic crisis in their research interest? Is there any alignment, or dis-alignment among policy-makers and epistemic communities in respect to reshaping educational policies to handle with the crisis? And how this is happening at EU level, and at the national sit? To what extent, does the crisis translate in a reduction of the boundaries of education, and start a reassembling of education by letting emerge unexpected sociologies of education?