Federico Farini

Trust Building as a Strategy to Avoid Unintended Consequences of Education. The Case Study of International Summer Camps Designed to Promote Peace and Intercultural Dialogue among Adolescents.

This article aims to offer both a theoretical contribution and examples of practices of trust building in peace education; the article presents an empirical analysis of videotaped interactions in the context of peace education activities in international groups of adolescents. The analysis regards two international summer camps promoted by the School of Peace of Monte Sole, established in the Province of Bologna, Italy, in the place where in 1944 a Nazi assault killed almost 800 children, women and old people. Each camp lasted two weeks, and was attended by four delegations of 10 adolescents coming from different countries; the camps aimed to promote adolescents’ ability in conflict resolution, their interest in peaceful relationships and their respect for different perspectives, and reducing their prejudices and stereotypes. Our analysis highlights some ways in which facilitators’ actions create the conditions of adolescents’ trusting commitment in group activities. Through promotional and feedback questions, formulations and also linguistic help, facilitators can promote adolescents’ trusting commitment in peace education, supporting their agency and avoiding evaluations of their interpretations. Facilitators are able to build trust projecting affective expectations, which are expectations of adolescents’ self-expression as a result of the interaction.

School Activism: The Meanings of Political Participation of Young Migrants in Italian Schools

Farini presents the results of four empirical research projects concerning migrant children in Italy. Data consists of young migrants’ narratives, promoted and collected in 62 focus group and 118 individual interviews. Respondents in the four projects were 17–20 years old at the moment of data collection and resident in Italy for more than one year. Non-probabilistic and convenience sampling methods were used to select respondents, and narrative analysis was used to examine the data collected. The narratives produced suggest a criticism of the idea of cultural identity as an ‘essential’ identity, something given and fixed. Farini’s research approaches personal narratives as constructed through multicultural dialogue, that is, a social process rather than an object. Issues surrounding the complexity of cultural identities are visible in the data, and the possibilities of cultural hybridisation through multicultural dialogues are presented.