Between the Road and the Town: An Ethnographic Study of the Education of Traveling Attractionists

Legislation, Projects and Strategies for the Implementation of Educational Inclusion in Italy: Results, Questions and Future Prospects

“…However, the educational inclusion of non Italian pupils and students -as Fondazione Agnelli (2010) points outcontinues to be matter of concern, mainly owing to the fact that [1] the official rule of enrolling them in the grade corresponding to their age is not always honored; [2] their school delay grows significantly with age and school grade and level and it may indicate schools' partial inability to meet pupils' educational needs; [3] there is a risk of strengthening and disseminating stereotypical views of other cultures (often at the origin of incidents of social uneasiness and/or bullying, see [10,[18][19][20][21], and of ignoring the interesting changes within those groups, as it has been stressed by ethnographic research.…”

“…The various aspects of diversity, and its problematic relation to education and migration [10,18,[57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65] With regard to the socio-cultural changes already mentioned, it must be underlined how, in the 1990s, a number of cultural anthropologists generously answered the concerns and questions about culture, ethnicity, identity that arose from teachers of multicultural classrooms. Through writings and lectures those anthropologists aimed to provide the intellectual tools for making sense of diversity and for becoming aware of the risk of cultural reification.…”

Learning from others, learning with others: The tense encounter between equality and difference

“…the right to education is not realized, or realized in a do-it-yourself fashion which is not available to everyone, and that certainly cannot be the means by which the right to education may be upheld (Gobbo, , 2006(Gobbo, , 2007a(Gobbo, , 2007b.…”

“…Thus, the Veneto fairground and circus people whom I studied between 1999 and 2001 claimed that their occupational nomadism made them to be perceived as others by the sedentary residents of towns and villages that periodically host fairs and these occupational nomads (Gobbo, , 2006(Gobbo, , 2007a(Gobbo, , 2007b. With time, and their communication abilities, those travelling families succeed in making themselves trusted and appreciated by their periodic hosts.…”

“Send in the Clowns!”, or the Imagination at Work: the Narratives of Three Pediatric Ward Clowns

“…The fieldwork experience, with its challenging but warm encounters and the interpretation of a multifaceted cultural reality (Gobbo 2003(Gobbo , 2006(Gobbo , 2007(Gobbo , 2009, subsequently led me to explore the world of the circus and travelling entertainment as it has been investigated and rendered by artists in different fields (2014,2015 forthcoming). It is not surprising that my interest for that cultural environment and its inspirational role in contemporary societies was once more revived, and problematized, by a winter conversation with a young man who every week dons the clown Auguste's clothes and, at the pediatric ward of the university hospital, works at bringing smiles to the sick children and the adults (parents, friends, and an occasional nurse or doctor) attending to them.…”