Homo pontem: teachers as bridges to a multicultural Italy

Abstract

This article explores the appearance of new teacher roles within the Italian education discourse, in particular focusing on official and scholarly texts from 1990 to 2015. During the second half of this period, the conceptual borders of two distinct roles, the intercultural teacher and the cultural mediator, begin to blur so that all teachers are called to engage in mediation. The role of mediator is made up of practices and dispositions intended to create a bridge between non-Italian students and Italian schools. The collapse of the teacher and mediator roles creates a new discursive context in which the Italian teacher is positioned to reconstitute her/himself through the adoption of these new practices and dispositions, thus constituting a new subjectivity. The new subjectivity, homo pontem, is in part an effect of political reasoning and the theorising of intercultural and citizenship education that has produced state-sponsored policies meant to manage immigrants in Italian schools. The Italian Ministry of Education first referred to intercultural education in 1990, marking a starting-off point for this study. Through a discourse analysis of ministerial documents and Italian scholarship, the overlapping of the roles of cultural mediator and intercultural teacher is tracked. The effect of this overlapping suggests the availability of new techniques of the self, with the Italian teacher called upon to engage in practices that facilitate non-Italian students’ integration, foster dialogue between cultures, and protect a new Italian way of being in today’s multicultural Italian nation-state.