A Resilience View of the School and Neighbourhood Community Actions

Abstract

Only a decade ago, and in a marginal way, resilience thinking was explicitly affecting school community actions in supporting maintenance and management of school structures, actions that for several decades have been a key factor of school life. However, as these initiatives are largely bottom-up ones and involve a large number of citizens interested in school activities, they take on a high interest from the point of view of resilience. In fact, many meaningful experiences and arguments that are not born in the riverbed of resilient thinking can be deemed part of it. The aim of this text is to analyse school community actions in terms of resilience, in order to better understand their characters. These actions are almost entirely characterized by constructive, functional, social and cultural interventions designed to provide students with good quality teaching in comfortable, functional and stimulating environments. In several cases, these actions are not just about the school, since they also target the upgrading of the neighbourhood structures and seek to improve the civic sense and knowledge of the relative community. These actions are the result of several factors, not always integrated, ranging from the commitment of teachers, pupils, parents, citizens and associations to the stimulation and support actions of the municipalities to public and private funding. The first section of the article explicates the classification of the actions of the secondary school communities from the point of view of resilience thinking, which is used in the other sections of the article to classify and describe several illustrating school community actions, mainly Italian, which have interesting resilient characters.