Language and Literacy Brokering in the Covid-19 Emergency

One of the measures applied to contrast the Covid-19 emergency was the closing of schools. The ensuing implementation of online schooling brought to the fore the inherent and often unperceived weaknesses of the Italian educational system that is not equipped to ensure equal access to education to all children, particularly to those from families with an immigrant background who are exposed to a particularly high risk of poverty (Eurostat 2017) and educational poverty (Crul 2013, OECD 2015 and 2018, Save the Children 2017). Online schooling had a huge impact on the communication and literacy needs of these children (and their families), who, in normal circumstances, rely on language brokers and support teachers to communicate, learn and interact (Antonini 2016). The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of how schools and teachers dealt with all those situations in which they needed to interact with families with an immigrant background and to provide literacy support to children with limited or no competence in the Italian language. This will be done by a content analysis (with nVIVO) of the narratives collected by means of semi-structured interviews with primary and middle school teachers in the Forlì-Cesena area. The interviews focussed on how schools and teachers communicated with non-Italian speaking parents and the kind of support to literacy given to children with an immigrant background. The content analysis of the collected narratives will illustrate how online schooling failed to enable these children to partake in their right to education. Moreover, the results will show how the involvement and inclusion of children with a migrant background was more than often left to individual teachers’ micro initiatives, good will and creativity.