ABSTRACT
In a collection of observations about teaching, Giuseppe Caliceti, an elementary school teacher, writes,
[I]n the Grisandi Elementary School in Luzzara, in the province of Reggio Emilia, a class has been formed for the Indian students only. Their parents cry out in the school courtyard: “You do not want our children in school, so why do you want our labor?” The Luzzara principal admits to having been pressured by Italian parents: they were threatening to go and enroll their children in the neighboring town. For a school these days, the presence of foreign children is a mark against it. (Caliceti, 2011, p. 159) 1
And Francesca Valenza, one of the leaders of Polo Intermundio, an after-school initiative sponsored by the parents’ association at the Di Donato Elementary School in Rome, recounts:My Moroccan friend’s daughter one day returned home and told her mother, “Mamma, the teacher says that there are foreign kids at our school,” and her mother replied, “Yes, but we, too, are foreigners.” “Really?” answered her daughter, “Since when?” (Roma, scuola Di Donato, 2012)
These two accounts speak to the differentiating force of the categories “Italian” and “foreigner” within the Italian educational discourse, so that in the former instance the school with Indian students has a “mark against it” due to the presence of foreigners and in the latter, a child born and/or raised in Italy for most (or all) of her life discovers she is a foreigner in the only country she has ever really known.