School Reform and its Public: Diffusion, Propagation or Propaganda?

Since 2003 the Italian school system has been the target of the reform for all the curricula from preschool to high school level. The Ministry of Education has promoted an intensive activity of diffusion both of official documents (laws, etc.) and reports produced by various committees of experts, requested of producing scientific and educational argumentations about the major issues of reform. Intensive debates both between and within Trade Unions, teachers' Trade Unions and parents' associations as well have accompanied the long journey of Parliament discussions of reform with a huge amount of published documents. From the social psychological point of view, this kind of written documents could be seen as cultural tools for diffusion, propagation or propaganda of ideas, ideological and educational values (Moscovici 1961/1976 ). Following this theoretical framework, our contribution will be focused on the analysis of written documents chosen from different sources (Ministry, associations) in order to find out the different discourses and the style of argumentation in favour or against the reform according to different sources. Methodology: Given the huge amount of documents, the study will be focused on the pre-school (kindergarten) to junior high school (3-14 years). Documents will be submitted to an appropriated content analysis and discourse analysis through software Alceste (Reinert, 1986; Matteucci, Tomasetto, 2002; Tomasetto, Selleri, 2004). Interpretation of results (in terms of segmentation of classes of content) will be made following the classification of discourse suggested by Moscovici: diffusion propagation and propaganda. Classes of content and specific examples of argumentations are the outcome of the analysis as well as the specific sources associated with classes and argumentations. Conclusions: Different representations of children and pupils and different representations of what education and teaching -learning processes really is, are expected according to different sources. Ideological belongingness of sources (different Trade Unions, religious vs. non religious characteristics of parents' and teachers' associations) will be introduced as variables to interpret in details different styles of argumentation. As a complementary finding we expect to describe whether the official position of the Ministry is more akin to some Trade Unions and to parents' and teachers' associations.