Governing through guidance: an analysis of educational guidance practices in an Italian lower secondary school

ABSTRACT

Current social policy discourse defines educational and career guidance as a key tool to enhance individual self-realisation while pursuing collective social objectives (economic growth, reduction of drop-out rate, social inclusion). Relying on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, critical research has long destabilised this mainstream narrative by stressing that guidance polices constitute a technology of government through which the political ambition to govern is realised by shaping citizens’ desires and ambitions. This article aims to provide an in-depth empirical analysis of how governing practices unfold within a concrete guidance setting. Based on ethnographic data, the essay focuses on guidance practices addressing 13–14-year-old students in Italy moving from comprehensive education to a tracked educational level. Particular emphasis is given to the role played by guidance forms, questionnaires and exercises. These materials, it is argued, enable particular technologies of the self that are key to involving individual in practices of self-government.

KEYWORDS:

• Guidance policies
• self-evaluation forms
• governmentality
• self-management
• Foucault
• policy enactment
• technology of power
• technology of the self

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 According to Foucault’s anti-essentialist view, humans are not simply subjects from the beginning, but are made to be subjects. Subjects emerge through discursive practices that address, involve and constitute them as recognizable entities that can be acknowledged by others. As discourse is unfolded with power relations, Foucault uses the terms ‘subjection’ or ‘subjectification’, signalling the impossibility of abstractly free and self-determined individualities and pointing out that subjects are always performative products of power/knowledge devices (for a discussion see Butler, 1997).

2 As studies with a socio-material sensibility have long stressed, these materials, together with other social and human entities, participate in the coproduction of educational experiences and in the processes of learning and subjectification (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011).

3 Within the Italian context, guidance activities at secondary school level are mainly concerned with providing students standardised information about the local upper secondary school offer. However, in recent years, a National Guidance Plan has been approved and there has been a proliferation of institutional initiatives to boost educational and career guidance within schools (Miur, 2009; PCL, 2012). Government narratives stress that interest in guidance activities is motivated by the belief that these will help students make ‘better’ choices and reduce educational dropout (Miur, 2012). In accordance with the mainstream EU narrative, government documents aim to foster a person-centred dialogue-pedagogic approach to guidance which allow individuals to handle life transitions autonomously (Miur, 2014). The guidance project discussed in this article was set up as a school-level action responding to the guidelines approved by the Ministry of Education.

4 After 5 years of primary and 3 years of lower secondary school, Italian students (at about age 14) are expected to choose among 3 main upper secondary school tracks characterized by specific curricula and qualifications. While Licei are commonly seen as highly demanding, lengthy and mainly university-oriented tracks; vocational schools are perceived as routes for a quick entrance into the labour market; technical schools are somewhere in between. Transitions from lower to upper secondary school are formally subjected to a regime of free choice, and sociological research has extensively pointed out the role played by social origin on students’ educational decisions as well as the weight of upper secondary school choices on students’ future educational attainment and social position (Panichella & Triventi, 2014).

5 Ethical issues were discussed with, and the research plan approved by, the PhD board of the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan. Adequate measures have been taken to obtain informed consent from students, their parents, counsellors and teachers. All names in the paper are fictional.

6 Thus, counsellors constantly solicited students to be the ‘protagonist’ of the guidance path:

We are here to give you an opportunity! You can choose to profit from it or not. You can choose now to be the protagonist of the choices you will make, to acquire methods, to learn how to better use your own potentialities and qualities to do what you desire. (Counsellor1, pointing at a student who left a form unfilled)

7 Counsellors photocopied and collected the forms completed by each students. This material constituted a student dossier and played a crucial role in allowing the authoritative discourse of the counsellors to penetrate students’ own self-image during one-to-one meetings.

8 The technical and vocational tracks were commonly described by students as ‘easy school’ or ‘school for the dumb’. Generally, students shared the view that these tracks could not lead to good, high-status jobs in the future and that these choices were only ‘second-best’, that is, for students performing badly at school and unwilling to fit into the challenging academic track.

9 A long-running tradition of studies has shown how teaching and counselling practices may differ according to the social composition of the public they address (Atkinson, 2013). The empirical material used in this paper has been gathered within only one specific school context. Consequently, I could not explore if and how guidance technologies unfold differently for groups with differing composition (i.e. in terms of social class, age, gender, etc.). However, this research path may be followed using ethnographically grounded governmental analysis which allows a deeper integration of governmentality studies with issues of social differentiation and inequality (Mckee, 2009).

10 Over the course of about two school days, students left their classrooms individually to meet the counsellors in an empty room reserved for this purpose. These meetings lasted 10–40 minutes depending on how responsive the students had been to classroom activities and the structure of discussion was relatively similar to the one described with Arianna.