METROPOLITAN EDUCATION: THE WORK OF MAESTRI DI STRADA IN THE SUBURBS OF THE CITY AND THE PSYCHE

Hypermodern metropolises are complex places which hinder personal growth (Kaës, 2012). In order to adequately support the development of the youth, updating old educational configurations is not enough; a new metropolitan education, founded on a pedagogy of resistance and wandering, is needed: resistance of the human to the anonymous rationality of subject-less processes and market laws; wandering to move out of pre-established schemes and build new and original paths (Moreno, Parrello and Iorio, 2014). The association Maestri di Strada has realised Progetto Chance (Chance Project) in Naples for eleven years, a school of second-chances for the rehabilitation of drop-outs (Moreno, Valerio, 2004; Melazzini, 2011); in 2010 it has started Progetto E-Vai (E-Vai Project), which works inside the scholastic institution, especially in the eastern suburbs of the city, involving about 300 students, 50 teachers and 30 operators of the association for about 1750 hours of field activities and 750 hours of coordination, re-planning and meetings of “multivision group” every year (Moreno, Parrello e Centro, 2012; Parrello, Moreno, 2015), together with other projects realised in the local area (dedicated to parents and teenage mothers, and to the construction of a local theatrical centre) or on national territory (for example, training courses for the diffusion of applied methodologies). This way, in five years it has been established a model of educational integrated experimentation which has been able to activate some virtuous changes in contexts with an high number of school drop-outs, juvenile disadvantage and social exclusion. (Checchi, 2014). Our metropolitan education, based on principles of cultural psychology (Vygotskij, 1934; Bruner, 1996; Rogoff, 2004) and psychoanalysis (Winnicott, 1965; Balint, 1958; Bion, 1962; Kaës, 2012), focuses primarily on the axiom of meaningness: people only learn what has a meaning for themselves, only what is produced in the dialogue between people allied in sharing the human fragility. In order to support the processes of construction of the meaning, common spaces of reflection are needed, places where to stop in the constant becoming of things: to reflect on something means to think about oneself in context, to connect with others and with one’s own emotional life, opposing the fragmentation of urban experience which produces isolation and disorientation. Moreover, there is the need for the valorization of informal learning, and particularly of art, in order to allow to express what is otherwise unexpressed: we realise many laboratories in schools and in the territory (theatre, figurative arts, history with music, agriculture, make up, journalism, mathematical games, scientific experiments…) (Moreno, 2015; Parrello, Iorio, 2015; Parrello, in press). The work of the maestri di strada also hinders the fragility or the absence of care proposing a good narcissism able to support development: in education it is necessary to take care of oneself and the others, dealing with the details of every activity, with the interchange with the contexts, supporting the narration which publishes the complexity of development. It is therefore indispensable to support every adult implied in the educative processes, starting with the numerous teachers often broken by the loss of social value of their profession, constantly at risk of burn-out (Fiorilli et al., 2014). Only by entering the suburbs of the psyche of everyone implied in the dynamics of intergenerational transmission (Parrello, 2014) it is possible to start authentic processes of development of the youth, but also of our cities.