Educating community and resilience, a way to integrate young disadvantaged migrants

Our contribution declines the concept of resilience within the educating community; in particular, through the project "Oltre I Muri" the educating community has been able to change the educational environment of disadvantaged young people, in order to spur them and stimulate their learning through unusual locations and educational approaches. We present a work on the evaluation of a pilot program addressed to foreign adolescents with low language skills and high dropout risk, in junior high school. The intervention - developed by CNR-IRCrES and Piazza dei Mestieri (a private training centre in Turin) jointly with junior high schools - aims at filling their gaps both in general subjects knowledge and in soft skills. In order to facilitate the process of re-motivation and to favour the attachment to the school environment, "Oltre I Muri" propose the experimentation of alternating school-professional training activities. The swing of activities allows to experiment a different way of learning based on inductive pedagogic methods, professionally-oriented teaching, and individual coaching. In particular, the students involved in the project have the chance to move (for 290-hour) in professional training courses, instead of going to school and they can experience the basic subjects learning (Italian, math and English) through ateliers practice. The project was conceived in synergy among educators, trainers and teachers, in order to face successfully a transversal problem, which concerns both the scholastic and the social integration of young people. The pilot project has been evaluated through experimental counterfactual approach, we constructed a grid of profiling variables, that are monitored, for students belonging both to treated and control groups. The aim was to assess social and behavioural skills, alongside other variables concerning school performance. Previous experimental evaluations of similar programs (see Kautz et al., 2014) provide ambiguous results: depending on program features such as length of the treatment, role and pervasiveness of training, tutors, mentors, families' and peers' influence, long-term analyses showed either positive (Durlak et al., 2011) or negative (Rodrigues-Planas, 2012) effects on some outcome variables such as behavioural attitudes, soft skills, educational attainment, future wages and other labour market outcomes. Concerning our results, "Oltre I Muri" proved effective in contrasting early school leaving. In particular, 2 out of 10 untreated students dropped out during the pilot, while all the 11 treated students continued to attend regularly. This can be interpreted as a 20% increase in the attendance rate, which can be attributed to the project with a confidence level of the 80%, i.e. a value that is acceptable in a very small sample. When we discussed, for validation, the results of the evaluation with the teachers, they observed that there was great variation across the students in learning progress made, but it clearly emerged a strong impact of the project on students' motivation.