Abstract:

We have chosen the Integrated Education and Training Program, a socio-educational measure adopted by schools after all other school inclusion measures for young people aged 15 to 18 have been exhausted. We focus on the analysis of this program in a municipality in the northern region of Portugal, in two school clusters attended by Roma young people who have school trajectories of failure, absenteeism and effective school dropout, being at risk. The specificity of these young gipsies is based on a culture where oral transmission predominates, valuing the concrete and the knowledge related to the performance of daily activities that ensure cultural and social reproduction. There is a cultural clash between family and school socialization processes and, although the importance of school has grown in the younger generations, it is still not significant enough to be part of their life projects. They end up leaving school unsuccessfully, and having no other means to support social inclusion, they are a population at risk or effectively in social exclusion. If in order to understand their school paths, their relationship with school and with school knowledge, it is necessary to summon the specific characteristics of the young people and those of the family environment and the local context where they live, we cannot fail to consider factors of the school organization: the school climate experienced, the school curricula out of step with the skills of young people who don't have the prerequisites necessary to follow them, and who are not recognized for skills other than the academic/scientific ones foreseen. Believing that school should be a place of inclusion of intercultural diversity, the socio-educational measure is adequate to promote school, personal, and social skills that enable young people to be included in school, work, and society. The main objective is to understand whether the implementation of the curricular organization underlying the PIEF measure has guaranteed a personalized pedagogical monitoring and the development of plans for each student, responding to their multiple needs for comprehensive development, promoting learning that develop areas of different skills. The technical-pedagogical team, by carrying out practical and experimental work, blurring the disciplinary fragmentation, focusing on unifying themes, and using methodologies that favor pedagogical differentiation, can enhance the development of learning in various areas of the curriculum matrix. This measure presents the specificity of social intervention in school contexts, highlighting the importance of a systemic intervention, in multidisciplinary teams, focused on the skills of young people and families and on intercultural mediation. We aim to understand the importance of this social intervention, based on the ecological perspective, in combating school and social exclusion. We consider the need to reorganize the school towards a true inclusion that understands multiculturalism as a positive value and that ensures that social inequalities do not become school inequalities. Adopting a qualitative approach, implemented through interviews with local intervention specialists who work with these young people, we intend to find out their perceptions of their professional practices and the role they have in building a school that ensures that all students, and also those from ethnic minorities, have longer school pathways and socially valued school diplomas.

Keywords:

Integrated Education and Training Program, school inclusion, gipsy ethnic youth, intervention of specialized technicians.