Second-generation youth in Italy and their path to adulthood. Who is supporting them?

Introduction: A world on the move

Italy’s state-school population includes 193 different nationalities. A total of 814,851 (9.2%) of pupils in the country (Ministry of Education, University and Research [MIUR], 2017) are of non-Italian nationality (n.I.n.), though 55.3% of these ‘non-Italian’ students were born in Italy. Among under-18s, this statistic rises to 72.7%. Thirty years after the first measures promoting the integration of migrant pupils were announced, the data tell a story of educational disadvantage, which itself speaks of an ingrained structural inequality.

The Italian school system has taken the path of integration and (in theory) an intercultural approach to teaching and learning (MIUR, 2007, 2012, 2014). The data suggest some progress and a ‘progressive capability [of the system] in integrating non-Italian children and adolescent’ (MIUR, 2014, p. 4). However, a number of characteristics place Italian schools at an intermediate level, with n.I.n. students still lagging academically. And though the share of students being held back a year has dropped by 10 percentage points over the most recent five-year period, recent statistics (MIUR, 2017) confirm the impression that there are structural disadvantages attributable to the school system itself. For instance, the figures for students who are behind in relation to their direct contemporaries break down as follows (Foundation for Initiatives and Studies on Multiethnicity [ISMU] & MIUR, 2016, p. 9):

Primary level: 13.4% of n.I.n. students, compared to 1.8% of Italian nationals;

These figures are partly attributable to the widespread practice of placing first-generation migrant children in the year below their contemporaries. However, beyond primary education, as greater demands are placed on students’ abilities (especially their command of ‘academic’ language), the disparity increases (MIUR, 2017).

We must also consider adolescents who drop out of education early. Among ‘native’ Italians, 13.6% are ‘early school leavers’; this figure rises to 27.1% for other European Union (EU) nationalities and 34.4% for non-EU students.

Second-generation ¹ young people in Italy are required to attend some form of upper-secondary education (education is compulsory till the age of 16). Vocational colleges, which offer a route into work but less so into university, attract a disproportionately large share of students from a migrant background (28.9% of Italian-born n.I.n. students; 38.8% of n.I.n. students born in other countries – ISMU & MIUR, 2016; MIUR, 2014).

In 2013, the level of Not in Education, Employment or Training status among 15 to 29-years-old in Italy broke down as follows: 24.7% of Italian nationals, 34.6% of other EU nationals, 35.9% of non-EU nationals (Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, 2015).

These substantial figures reveal a ‘deep-rooted disparity’ in the academic progress of students from migrant backgrounds (ISMU & MIUR, 2015, p. 9; MIUR, 2014). In short, the statistics (ISMU & MIUR, 2016; Italian National Institute of Statistics [ISTAT], 2016; MIUR, 2017) reveal a narrative in which educational disadvantages lead to structural inequality that in turn translates into, or reinforces, phenomena of social injustice. In this sense, one of the most significant conclusions of the theoretical review carried out is the lack of cultural recognition afforded to migrant students that is still detected in Italian schools. The majority of the didactic experiences observed either ignored or discriminated against the cultural differences of migrants, clearly fostering a model of cultural assimilation (Ambrosini & Caneva, 2009; Ambrosini, 2004; Caneva, 2011; Damiano, 2008).

Against this backdrop, it seems reasonable to explore such questions as: which adults are supporting young second-generation students during their education? Where, and to which groups, do second-generation youth feel they belong? What is their identity? What models of social justice and equality inform the policies that affect them?

Voices of the second generation. The study

Our approach was essentially phenomenological-eidetic (Husserl, 2002; Moustakas, 1994), the principal interest being participants’ experience of phenomena: what difficulties do they encounter on their journey to adulthood? What is their sense of belonging and identity? Who is supporting them? With this in mind, we aim to involve a 100 second-generation young people.

The study comprises four phases:

Phase 1 (completed): 15 semi-structured interviews;

The criteria for selection are as follows: born in Italy; migrant parents who are still resident in Italy; good standard of Italian; good academic performance; participating voluntarily. The 25 participants interviewed to date (17 female and 8 male, in 15 phase 1 and 10 phase 2 interviews) are all aged 18 to 26. Their families originate in 10 different countries in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.

The key questions are: What does ‘belonging’ mean to you? To what/whom do you feel/think you belong? What difficulties have you encountered in your own life? What support have you received? The study seeks to find, in the participants’ accounts, a sense of what it means to grow into adulthood in this sort of no man’s land between two or more cultural universes, specifically within the Italian context, and at a moment in time in which the winds of the political far-right are beginning to pick up, once again, across the Western world. We ask: what characterises the experiences of young adults from a migrant background in Italy, and do these experiences share structural commonalities?

The interviews were conducted by one of the two authors, who was introduced to participants via the social circles of certain of her university students. The researcher met with each participant twice. At the first meeting, the participant was presented with the project and asked whether he or she would be prepared to take part. The interview would take place during the subsequent encounter. In the second phase of the study, participants were also asked at the first meeting if they could prepare a written, narrative account (Atkinson, 2002). This instrument was added with a view to giving due space to the subjective aspect of the participants’ experiences (Bruner, 1994). The narrative text was to be given to the researcher either prior to, or on the day of, the administration of the interview. For the interviews, we adopted a semi-structured model, a choice that reflected our appreciation of both the effectiveness of this format as a knowledge-gathering instrument, but also the educational benefits it offers for the participants themselves (Sorzio, 2005). The introductory ‘meetings’ took place either at the university or in a nearby café, or occasionally over the phone. The interviews were carried out at the researcher's own office or home, or else at a quiet location selected by the participant.

The first phase of the study was carried out during the 2016–2017 academic session, the second phase in the 2017–2018 session. On average, the interviews lasted 40 minutes. An audio recording was made of each interview and subsequently transcribed, with each participant given a copy of the transcription.

The research data is constituted by the full transcripts of the 25 interviews conducted and analysed so far, and 10 short narrative texts collected during the second phase. The study applies the precepts of ‘grounded theory’, a research methodology that seeks to operationalise the underlying spirit of phenomenology in the way it configures the process of data codification. This approach is known as ‘open coding’.

In keeping with this principle, the categories of data presented here were not determined a priori. Rather, they emerged from the analysis of the data itself. In order to ‘make the data speak’, the researcher has to be careful to maintain what Edmund Husserl defined as ‘faithfulness to the phenomenon’. Working separately, the two researchers involved carried out a provisional conceptual analysis of the data, identifying a number of ‘labels’ which would subsequently be compared and cross-referenced to establish a consensus as to the ‘units of meaning’ that had emerged. These units of meaning were then grouped under specific headings.

The participants’ narratives were analysed by the authors in the same way.

The macro-political implications of the results

In Italy, we face two issues that correlate closely with social injustice: (a) the inadequacy of the school system (curriculum, teacher training, support of L2 acquisition) and (b) citizenship laws that openly penalise second-generation migrants.

Discussion and conclusions. A long uphill journey

Our research with 25 second-generation migrants between the ages of 18 and 26 highlights the way that the transition to adulthood is a difficult and complex process for young people from a migrant background, even those who have graduated from secondary school or university.

The data presented here are undoubtedly still only partial. All the same, the analysis has enabled us to highlight a number of significant aspects of the participants’ lived experiences such as the scarcity of support afforded them by the social and institutional context in which they live. In these young people’s experiences at least, it is a context characterised by laissez-faire attitudes and rejection. Other research in Italy has cast a light less on these sorts of difficulty and more on the resources that being a second-generation immigrant tends to confer (Granata, 2015). In order to assess whether what has emerged in the interviews represents common experience among second-generation young people, subsequent phases of the study will involve focus groups and additional interviews with sub-groups of a ‘homogeneous’ background (for instance, 10 interviews have already been conducted with second-generation young people of Brazilian and Argentinian origin; 10 more will be conducted with young people of Maghreb origin, 10 with young people of Chinese origin, 10 with young people whose families come from Central Africa, etc.). The aim is to assess whether it is possible to separate the impact of phenotype and religion on the experience of being a second-generation young person (prejudices, stereotypes, etc.) from what we might call the ‘essence’ of the experience itself.

Although the various participants focus on different aspects of their experiences, every interview reveals episodes in which, at one time or another, the interviewee has encountered a lack of recognition and/or experienced a sense of rejection and isolation. Each individual has developed his or her own strategies to deal with such experiences: some take steps to play down such incidents; some become bullies themselves; others choose the path of assimilation. Regardless of the chosen solution, however, or the results obtained, for the young people interviewed the road to adulthood has meant suffering, loneliness and even, in some cases, genuine trauma. The data collected confirms what has emerged from previous studies in terms of the complexity of the phenomenon, and the difficulties and hardships experienced by (even third-generation) students from a migrant background on the path to adulthood (Gualda, 2011; Portes & Rumbaut, 2005; Thomassen, 2010).

For these young people, the encounter with the school system has been particularly significant (both in a positive and a negative sense). It is at their school desks, more than any other situation, that they have been forced to reckon with their differentness. In their classes, they have learned which aspects of their identity are considered most important in the eyes of others (schoolmates and teachers), and which aspects are deemed to be lacking, thus preventing them from being perceived as equals. As pointed out by García-Castaño, Olmos, and Bouachra (2015), immigrant students continue to be treated as though they represent a problem, as though their deficiencies must be compensated for (lack of knowledge of the vehicular language of education, low educational level, ignorance of the host country’s cultural patterns, etc.). When describing their experience of school (teaching methods, communicational resources and processes), the young people interviewed highlight the processes by which, in their experience, this otherness is constructed, processes in which marginalisation and exclusion feature heavily. In many cases, the school confirms its role as a setting of assimilation and control, operating, as an institution, on behalf of society and the political sphere to stifle difference (Dei, 2014). Consequently, in many schools a compensatory approach still prevails when managing cultural diversity (Santerini, 2010). In this sense, the school not only ignores difference, but also helps to reproduce inequality (Arroyo & Berzosa, 2018; Del Olmo, 2012, Santerini, 2011).

At its heart, our analysis of the interviews reveals the role played by the school system in these young people’s path to adulthood and just how fundamental an issue this is. As an institution, the school serves to promote the socialisation of its students within a single culture and to encourage them to recognise and value diversity at both an individual and cultural level. The data collected reveal the distance that the Italian school system still has to travel in this direction, and the reality of a political and social context in which access to citizenship and other rights is anything but a straightforward proposition for members of migrant families that have grown up in Italy. All the same, the school is as well placed as any institution to help tip the scales in the other direction by presenting individuals and the collective with an alternative reality founded on the values of recognition and social cohesion.

Our analysis of the interviews also reveals the fundamental role played, in the Italian context, by adults – namely teachers and parents – in overcoming the obstacles encountered by these young people in their development and education. The importance of these two actors working collaboratively to support students on their path to academic success and social inclusion is also noted in the literature (Garreta & Llevot, 2015; Dusi & Pati, 2014). In this sense, it is necessary to leverage the opportunities that the school generates as a context of coexistence in both its formal and informal spaces (Fortuin et al., 2014; Santerini, 2017). The school is, or must be, the place where an individually and socially diverse student body is offered the chance to experience forms of dialogue that are capable of generating new attitudes and ideas as well as social cohesion. This is why it is essential that the school system be capable, in turn, of recognising, accepting and supporting all of its students, without exception. One of the first steps it needs to take is to analyse its current attitudes to cultural diversity and measure them against the environment it wishes to provide. In this way, it can programme the transformation it needs to undertake.

In their quest for recognition, second-generation young people in Italy have, for some time now, been on the lookout for new opportunities to assert themselves, to find a place for themselves in society. It is partly for this reason, for instance, that we have seen them form groups and associations in which to meet up, compare experiences, and make their voices heard at a national level and assert their right to citizenship (these groups include La Rete G2, Yalla Italia, AssoCina, Giovani Musulmani d’Italia, Millî Görüş).

The experiences of rejection these young people have encountered on their journey to adulthood (in Italy, the country they were born in no less) have fed into their understanding of who they really are and their awareness of their origins (Granata, 2011; Nesteruk, Helmstetter, Gramescu, Hmmad Siyam, & Price, 2015). And even though these experiences of non-recognition, of being made to feel ‘foreign’, cannot only generate a sense of antagonism and drive a retreat into an alternative identity but also offer opportunities for growth, it remains the case that young people in this position are faced with a complex and painful challenge, that of constructing a mature identity for the self at the border of multiple real and symbolic universes, and doing so in a society that is largely hostile and disinclined to accept new Italians with almond-shaped eyes, dark skin or a different religion.