A Glance at Work . Educational Perspectives E-Book

Vanna Boffo

• Herausgeber: Firenze University Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The topics of work flexibility, precarious jobs, and the relationship between work, the market and production are subjects that are widely debated in the sociological, philosophical, economic and political spheres. Yet these topics are less touched on in the tradition of pedagogical research. The intention of this book is to build a seedbed for reflection on the central position assumed by work in the lives of every woman and man, inhabitants of a planet in which the transformation of work activities is imposing radical changes on lifestyles, community-building and societies. Work is not an abstract concept, but is incorporated into every human person who does it and into the relationships linking them to others. Man, his education and human formation provide the pivot around which to perform a pedagogical survey within the universe of "work", and inside the relationship between the human condition and working/professional life. What sense does work acquire today when going to observe children, young people, adults or migrants? Namely, what sense does it assume when its pivotal viewpoint is shifted off-centre in time and space?The essays intend to spark agile but critical, synchronic and diachronic reflection which, stemming from contextual questions on the meaning of work and on change in the workplace, will proceed to investigate the subjects in their specific lives and existential conditions.Essays by: Vanna Boffo, Pietro Causarano, Giovanna Del Gobbo, Emiliano Macinai, Maria Rita Mancaniello, Stefano Oliviero and Clara Silva.Vanna Boffo is researcher in general pedagogy at Florence University where she teaches Pedagogy of Care and Basic and Applied Research Methodology for Education and Training. In addition to numerous essays and articles, the latest books she has published are: Relazioni educative: tra comunicazione e cura (2011) and Comunicazione formativa. Percorsi riflessivi e ambiti di ricerca (with A. Anichini, F. Cambi, A. Mariani, L. Toschi, 2012). Among the volumes she has edited: Innovation Transfer and Study Circles (with P. Federighi, 2009), Content Embedded Literacy in the Workplace (with P. Federighi and I. Darjan, 2009) and Digital Storytelling for Employability (with L. Malita, 2010).

Leseprobe

STRUMENTI PER LA DIDATTICA E LA RICERCA

– 129 –

A Glance at Work

Educational Perspectives

edited by

Vanna Boffo

Firenze University Press

2012

A Glance at Work . Educational Perspectives / edited by Vanna Boffo. – Firenze : Firenze

University Press, 2012.

(Strumenti per la didattica e la ricerca ; 129)

http://digital.casalini.it/9788866551874

ISBN 978-88-6655-187-4 (online PDF)

ISBN 978-88-6655-188-1 (online EPUB)

ISBN 978-88-6655-321-2 (print)

Progetto grafico di Alberto Pizarro Fernández

Immagine di copertina: © Ragsac19 | Dreamstime.com

Translated by Karen Whittle

Ultimate responsibility for the revision of the chapters lies with the authors themselves.

This publication has been financed by Florence University Department of Education Sciences and Cultural and Training Processes 60% research funds.

***

Peer Review Process

All publications are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the FUP Editorial Board and the Scientific Committees of the individual series. The works published in the FUP catalogue are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house. For a more detailed description of the refereeing process we refer to the official documents published on the website and in the online catalogue of the FUP (http://www.fupress.com).

Firenze University Press Editorial Board

G. Nigro (Co-ordinator), M.T. Bartoli, M. Boddi, F. Cambi, R. Casalbuoni, C. Ciappei, R. Del Punta, A. Dolfi, V. Fargion, S. Ferrone, M. Garzaniti, P. Guarnieri, G. Mari, M. Marini, M. Verga, A. Zorzi.

© 2012 Firenze University Press

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Firenze University Press

Borgo Albizi, 28, 50122 Firenze, Italy

http://www.fupress.com/

Printed in Italy

Table of Contents

Introduction. Educational Glances at Work

Vanna Boffo

Work and Person: Sense, Care and Relationships

Vanna Boffo

Work and Person: Places of Labour as a Divided Territory

Pietro Causarano

Migrant Jobs and Human Cultures:

Transformation through a New Formation

Clara Silva

Migrant Jobs and Human Cultures:

Tangible and Intangible Know-How

Giovanna Del Gobbo

Childhood and Work: Protection and Obscuration

Emiliano Macinai

Young People and Work:Commodification and Perception

Stefano Oliviero

Diverse Jobs: Atypical Work and Formation to Support an Unstable Balance

Maria Rita Mancaniello

The Authors

Introduction. Educational Glances at Work

Vanna Boffo

No man is an iland, intire of it selfe;

every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;

[…] and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation 17

A Glance at Work. Educational Perspectives is a volume written by a group of authors1. It is not just a collection of essays drawn up by some of the scholars – Pietro Causarano, Clara Silva, Giovanna Del Gobbo, Emiliano Macinai, Stefano Oliviero and Maria Rita Mancaniello – who took part in the ‘Seminari sul lavoro’ (Seminars on Work) project. Instead, what I am introducing here is the expression of an unusual research path, which has been groundbreaking in its development. First of all, the topic can be said to be groundbreaking in that it is a route little trodden in present-day pedagogical publications. Our intention was to deal with work from the multiple viewpoints that we express as researchers in the pedagogical sphere: we started from the assumption that to deal with education and formation we must not leave out work – a central aspect in the lives of each one of us – from our fields of interest. Second to that was the method adopted, transversal and critico-interpretative in style, tackling a common path through the range of research methods distinguishing our various fields of professional study.

Therefore, on one hand, the essays collected here revolve around a topic that is borderline to the pedagogical sphere; and on the other hand, the manner in which this topic has been explored has seen the trans-disciplinary involvement of researchers who, while belonging to various scientific and pedagogical sectors, differ owing to their subjects of interest and methodological approaches. We considered the contamination between topics and methods to be an interesting and distinctive route to follow in order to investigate a topic – work – which, from the perspective of the human person, is experiencing a moment of immense unease, owing to the variability in contract types and the multiple attacks on the dignity of material living conditions. It is an unease that does not just concern the political and economic structures that have enabled this change to happen, namely a return to the past with regard to the job conditions of millions of workers, it concerns the human condition and its formation in the present day.

Through meetings and the shared research path, we were able to hold a series of seminars in the spring of 2011, from March to May, at the Faculty of Education Sciences at the University of Florence. The series consisted of six meetings, with an audience that was varied but mainly comprised students from the Faculty, focussing on the relationship between work and the various subjects usually dealt with in the researchers’ fields of pedagogical study: children, adolescents, migrants, the disabled2, adults and the family. Thanks to the series of seminars, the faculty and its students were able to follow the research as it developed, beginning from a simple, but evident question concerning the substantial absence of educational/formative debate on work as a human activity, as an educational emergency, as a cultural production process, and as a means for forming the person.

Therefore, we teamed up around the necessity to perform an educational task: to weave back together the multiple threads of a topic which could help us, in a pedagogical key, to decipher the sense of work in the formative processes of the subjects, individuals and human people whose paths of learning and schooling, educational relationships and formative dimensions, inside both formal and non-formal institutions, concern us by way of tradition and profession. This research process found expression, first of all, through the seminars, during which dialogue and conversation provided the means to open ourselves up to epistemological and didactical comparison.

In this sense, the volume that I am editing is the product of a common path, with shared methodological choices, whose investigation was extended thanks to listening to what the others had to say during the seminars and meetings. Each one of us was free to probe our own research sphere and to do so with the most suitable instruments available. However, we tried to follow the line of reflection given by the open and free, and once again transversal, use of the objects chosen for our single analyses.

Pedagogy, a science among the sciences of education, as such studies the formative process that involves all human beings during their existence, starting from when they assume a mental or physical form for the whole of their lifespan. Moreover, in Italy, over the last twenty years pedagogical studies on the category of formation3 have highlighted how the formative process can be included in the interpretation of the galaxy of education in which every man, but also every environment or institution, finds its own forms of subsistence. Indeed, as the Greek paideia had already clearly highlighted, education is the category that permits every man to deal with his own human condition. Societies and communities are constituted through and with education; the processes that permit the production and reproduction of cultures and vital living habits are educational processes. Inculturation, education, learning and human formation are educational processes that guarantee man’s survival in the forms of different life civilisations. As a discipline that deals with the education and formation of man, pedagogy has a particular gaze on the processes of teaching and learning, from that which takes place beginning in the first months of life to that which is structured in formal, non-formal and informal educational institutions. This is the theoretical context in which each of the authors of the essays carried out his or her research activity, an activity that then takes different directions: history of pedagogy, philosophy of education, social pedagogy, child pedagogy, intercultural pedagogy, special pedagogy, teaching new technologies, and marginality and deviance pedagogy. The researchers have dealt with educational processes, but, above all, with the subjects that interpret and live these processes in their daily existence.

So what is the relationship between pedagogy and work?

Work is seen today as a primary activity of man, alongside learning, inculturation and education: as a ‘banally’ human and everyday activity. So everyday and obligatory in order to live and survive that it has became necessary to try to understand and reflect upon it, almost break up and plough through it, so as to understand its directions, its multitude of places and meanings for the subjects who work, act, do jobs and professions, and to head down into dangerous territories, lonely, not trodden by our habitual research. What we are dealing with here is not educational professions which, on the contrary, are a widely debated topic.

Some disciplines traditionally deal with work – namely sociology, economics, political sciences, jurisprudence, medicine, psychology and engineering. Historians have shown much and in-depth interest in the object of our reflection, both in direct and transversal terms. The Annales historiographical tradition has also made a broad investigation of the matter, in precisely the same sense. It has dealt with subjects and ways of living, and by doing so, has given us an enlightening cross-section of the centuries and historical eras. Let us think of Philippe Ariès and his text, familiar to everyone in all Italian classrooms: Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life. Philosophy has been concerned with work and very minutely too. Just one of the many philosophers we can cite is Karl Marx, whose Capital was a central work for understanding the production processes of the modern and postmodern economies: dominating the Italian cultural scene for several decades, in particular in the 1970s and 80s, it then plunged from view, with no resistance from the many young people who, in his name, had expressed a freedom which they were not able to carry through into everyday adult life. Economics, a relatively young science, has taken charge of analysing just about all of the fields of research inherent to work and marked, in theory and in practice, the developments and processes of work organisation, starting from the production model of the Fordist factory in the twentieth century. However, labour law, occupational medicine, occupational psychology and occupational sociology also come to mind, developing sectors of study which have thus enabled the regulation of work and jobs in order to protect the workers themselves.

The topics of work flexibility, precarious jobs, and the relationship between work, the market and production are, therefore a widely debated subject in the sociological, philosophical, economic, juridical, political and medical fields. It would be important for a science of man, such as pedagogy, to be able to investigate the sense and meaning that these transformations have for the life of every human being. Work is not an abstract concept, but is incorporated into every person who does it and in the relationships linking them to others. Man, his education and human formation provide the pivot around which to perform a pedagogical survey within the universe of “work”, and inside the relationship between the human condition and working/professional life. What sense does work acquire today when we go to observe children, young people, migrants, the new poor and adults in situations of hardship? Namely, what sense does it assume when the abstractness of the economic reports, the figures, meet the people, the problems, the lives marked by fatal accidents in the workplace and the lack of work?

The intention of this volume is to build a seedbed for reflection on the central position assumed by work in the lives of every woman and man, inhabitants of a planet in which the transformation of working activities is imposing radical changes on lifestyles, community-building and societies. The essays intend to spark agile but critical, synchronic and diachronic reflection which, stemming from contextual questions on the meaning of work and on change in the workplace, will proceed to investigate the subjects in their specific lives and existential conditions. The contributions put together do not in any way claim to be exhaustive, but desire above all to place our students’ attention on different visions of a determining topic/problem in the formation of every educator and trainer. We were interested in reflection, we could say, from the bottom up, conducted in constant dialogue with various disciplinary sectors, the contamination giving rise to the wealth that always derives from generative communication and mutual listening.

The essays, originating from the seminars, are grouped around some conceptual hinges: work and person, work and migratory processes, children/young people and work, work and diversity. The first two texts, Work and Person:Sense, Care and Relationships (Vanna Boffo) and Work and Person: Places of Labour as a Divided Territory (Pietro Causarano), outline the context of the research path. The relationship between two key categories in the lives of men – work and person – is analysed from a pedagogical-theoretical viewpoint and a historico-educational perspective. On one hand, care for work, and in the workplace, emerges as a paradigm for a new educational perspective that looks to the objects produced by the work, things that speak of human bonds, as well as the subjective ethical dimension, so as to respond to the commodification of work and people. On the other hand, through the historico-educational lens, change in the workplace, substantially a change in organisational type, has been taken as the background for a look through the twentieth-century transformations that have accompanied the relationship between the subject’s working condition and his alterations; the analysis goes from factories to firms to the single workers, who, many times, have had to suffer these changes.

Migrant Jobs and Human Cultures: Transformation through a New Formation(Clara Silva) andMigrant Jobs and Human Cultures: Tangible and Intangible Know-How(Giovanna Del Gobbo) deal with an extremely topical subject, which is yet almost totally absent from the range of educational vision. Migrant jobs have a dual face, the present-day face of delocalisation, increasingly implemented by Western firms in countries in the East or South of the world, and that of migrants, forced to leave their countries of origin and seek fortune elsewhere in order to achieve a dignified life. The phenomena of immigration and emigration have always existed. Man is migrant by nature and culture, but globalisation has accentuated and massively intensified migration trends. From another point of view, however, work can also be seen as a cultural product which needs to be recognised so as not to cause mechanisms of exclusion and rejection: this is why it needs to be valorised, from an educational point of view.

Childhood and Work: Protection and Obscuration (Emiliano Macinai) and Young People and Work: Commodification and Perception (Stefano Oliviero) address two age ranges which, in educational terms, are quite dense, but given less thought in terms of work. Yet, by subtraction, work is present in both cases. What is the cost that the discovery of childhood has inflicted on the social dimension of how children are viewed and how much has this discovery actually made real children disappear? As Macinai asserts in his essay: «the topic of child work is used as an example in order to illustrate this ambivalent process, in which protection becomes exclusion and the recognition of childhood leads to children’s social obscuration». In a specular manner, the problem of young people today concerns their presence, of which we are all too aware, inside the labour market. Short-term contracts, flexibility, rigour, restricted numbers, lack of economic growth and social poverty are all aspects that young people are beginning to consider as not just what happens to their classmates, but as events that are more than likely to happen in their own lives.

Diverse Jobs: Atypical Work and Formation to Support an Unstable Balance (Maria Rita Mancaniello) deals with the condition of difference and diversity. Job precariousness is a social emergency that began to spread at the beginning of the 2000s. The Anglo-Saxon economies became familiar with the phenomenon in the 1990s, but it is a precariousness that becomes marginality when there are not suitable conditions of social protection. Where welfare, economic growth support policies, resource redistribution cultures and a balancing-out of unjust pay gaps are lacking, work flexibility becomes a way to create new slaves and to destroy the dignity of citizenship that we had struggled to acquire during the twentieth century.

The education and formation of man, the citizen of democratic civilisations, have an arduous task which, however, cannot be separated from the pursuit of political, economic and social objectives for the common human good. As asserted by Martha Nussbaum, long-term fighter for the civil rights of justice and equality for all the most disadvantaged inhabitants of the earth: «Education turns you around, so that you do not see what you used to see. It also turns you into a free man instead of a servant»4. Good practices, political programmes, economic action, attention to work and care for professions come about in cultures worthy of man, lived by every man according to the principles of social justice. But if there is no education or personal formation, that is, of everyone, to these principles, it will be all the more difficult to carry on constructing countries, and then a common world, where justice and solidarity can be distinctive signs of human time.

Florence, 18 January 2012Vanna Boffo

Acknowledgements

The common and shared work giving rise to this volume started us on a research path in which no step has been easy or taken for granted. My most heart-felt thanks go to the authors, my colleagues who believed in this path and were not discouraged in the face of the human and professional commitment that it requested. Thanks to Pietro Causarano, Clara Silva, Giovanna Del Gobbo, Emiliano Macinai, Stefano Oliviero, Maria Rita Mancaniello, Tamara Zappaterra, Gianfranco Bandini and Maria Ranieri who participated in the seminars on work for their generous contribution.

Together with all the researchers who collaborated on the ‘Seminari sul lavoro’ (Seminars on Work) project, I would like to thank the Dean of the Faculty of Education Sciences at the University of Florence, Prof. Simonetta Ulivieri, who enabled the seminars to take place by granting funds.

My gratitude to all my colleagues – professors and researchers – in the Faculty and Department of Education Sciences and Cultural and Training Processes, who heard and approved the proposal for our initiative in the respective board meetings.

Finally, thank you to all the students who followed the seminars, showing us that teamwork is always a source of learning, beyond all expectations.

Note

1 This book was published in Italian in May 2012. See V. Boffo (edited by), Di lavoro e non solo. Sguardi pedagogici, Simplicissimus Book Farm, Milan, 2012.

2 The Italian edition contains two additional essays to the English version relating to two topics discussed in the Seminars on Work cycle: the essay by Tamara Zappaterra, Lavori Di-versi: la disabilità adulta e il rafforzamento identitario, deals with the relationship between work and adult disability, while the essay by Maria Ranieri, Lavoro e nuove tecnologie: dall’uomo artigiano alla formazione digitale, is concerned with the digital revolution.

3 The category of formazione that is investigated in the essays in this book at times has been translated with “formation”, at times with “formative process”, and at others by “education” and/or “training”. Within Italian pedagogical studies, the topic of formazione (formation) has been one of the most important in the philosophy of education. Formation is meant as that personal and cultural process referred to by the Greek category of paideia and the German Bildung, as well as what can be deferred from the tradition of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and from the studies of German philosophers, beginning in the eighteenth century.

4 M.C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001 (orig. ed. 1986), p. 180.

Work and Person: Sense, Care and Relationships

Vanna Boffo

1. An introduction: the relationship between ‘work’ and ‘person’

The proposed essay is positioned at a level strictly adjacent to pedagogy as the science of man’s5 human formation6, and the methodological tools used, as well as the disciplines dealt with in this investigation, are part of that set of knowledge areas which come under the label of educational sciences. The aim of the reflection is to implement a comparison within the pedagogical-educational debate with topics connected to man’s life, such as work, care, professional practices and relationships in work contexts, which are important for all educators and trainers. Indeed, work has increasingly become a distinctive and decisive aspect of people’s lives, characterising both the modern era and, even more so, the postmodern epoch.

In the workplace, we are formed and transformed; employer-employee relations influence the personal growth of the employer- or employee- subjects involved. Work is a determining experience in the life of every young, adult and elderly person, as well as being a very important fact for understanding family well-being. There is a close bond between the study of relationship in the family and in the professional and working conditions of parents, mother-child, father-child and mother-father. Hence, it is upheld that dealing with work is a task which pedagogy, as a science of human formation, can and must fulfil. And it should not just look at the learning practices, vocational training or the most efficient training methodologies within professional contexts, but come up with a critical line of thought and reflection on the very topics of the world of work as the place and space for personal and collective transformation. Pedagogy can provide the sciences that have always dealt with work – sociology, economics, law, medicine, psychology and engineering – with a knowledge of man through human formation. It contains a wealth of history, actions, ideas, reflexivity and critical potentiality, but also of ethical and personal knowledge, about the self and the other.