New public management for Adult School Centers

Thinking sociologically through education is a preparatory part in the constitution of an interdisciplinary approach capable of making discussions on the geographies of globalization and knowledge society meaningful (Thiem, 2009). This work present the perspective in which those interventions can be understood - the evolution of Adult Education in the “social investment welfare state” (Giddens, 2014) - through a case of study that analyses the new public management of educational institutions in Italy. The institutional dimension of lifelong learning policies have the new feature of the Adult School Centers, link between the education system entrusted to the state and the training system entrusted to the Regions. The Adult School Centers as eterotopic space? Although Foucault describes heterotopia as a actually existent utopia (1984), the conception is not tied to a space that promotes any promise, or any form of change. The research design has proposed an analysis of the mechanisms and of the processes that led the Campanian institutions’ activities to build an integrated education and lifelong learning system. The legal and institutional dimension has highlighted the contextual conditions and the survey tools. Starting with the interviews to “preferential witnesses” about the implementation of administrative procedures, used both as categorical overall framework as well as specific “medium of communication” (De Luca Picione, 2017). The empirical results present the role played by the institutional actors and the learners of the adult evening classes to understand what kind of people reenters in educational processes (Formenti, West & Horsdal, 2014). The participation of people belonging to very different social categories – including those very far from some social vulnerability stereotypes – shows Adult Education becoming meaningful also in the perspective of an investment in active citizenship and not just as a means of individual empowerment in the labor market, and defines some possible action models on the territory in order to encourage to return adults to training. The target is to contribute to the discussion about the results of the policies in the public sphere, by sharing the elements of the produced analysis with the scientific community.