Promoting the community with schools in the periphery: from the Chance Project to the E-vai Project. Significant and world known Neapolitan action research for youth inclusion

Community schools meet the social need which goes beyond the concept of “reproducing the society” in order to become a tool for re-founding it by promoting simultaneous and integrated growth of a community of responsible professionals and active citizens to take care of the education process thus operating on the territory as a hub for human development able to generate new forms of social cohabitation, new citizenship and elements of civil economy. After operating for twelve years outside the school with the Chance Project, the Association Maestri di Strada chose to work in schools with the E-vai Project (Moreno, 2000, 2009; Moreno, Valerio, 2004; Melazzini, 2011; Parrello, Moreno e Centro, 2012): an integrated educational experimentation model which – after three years – seems to have activated positive changes in crumbled high drop out rate contexts and to have provided important elements for the understanding of a social system which strongly tends to expulsion. The E-vai Project (which promoted and achieved agreements with the Municipality, the Education dept. general direction and the University, but is supported by private donations) operates in the oriental periphery of the city of Naples, aimed by the purpose to promote the “community school” model. Educators and experts co-project with the teachers, work inside and outside the classroom by sharing curricular activities, planning laboratories which support the individual, the learning and teaching process by giving special attention to the transition moments. The equipe periodically meets in “Multi-vision” (perspective with various points of view, which exceed the restricted perimeter of a communication) group reflection spaces led by a psychologist and a pedagogue. The interventions involve the 3rd grades of 9 junior high schools and in the 1st and 2nd grades of 2 vocational senior high schools (for a total of 450 students out of which at least 100 risk to drop out, and almost 50 teachers) and partially involve other institutes and a territorial youth centre which would otherwise be underused.