Gender informal education in contemporary italian contest. Gender and educational biography, informal education, agency, disadvantage

In the pedagogical field, the need for helping young generations in the composition of their gender subjectivity has been highlighted. The main aim is to provide them useful means to deconstruct heteronimy and dependence conditions and to stimulate the identification and development of the various differences gender can take on. The intentionality of educational projects nevertheless remains far from the educational processes which inform gender learning and lie in educational experiences defined by pedagogical research as informal and widespread. Within this frame, research meant to collect and examine different gender formation stories of some young women; we investigated the traces and peculiarities of informal educational experiences composing the aforementioned stories and studied the attributions of meaning which these young women refer to their experiences. The recurrences identified in the collected material allowed us to detect some possible traces of informal and diffuse upbringing by means of the gender disadvantage and to investigate (informal) didactics and contents. Echoes of this disadvantage were also found in the modalities by which the young women thought and shaped their experience and in the way the conceived their gender construct. The pragmatic orientation which informed the research and motivated the attention for contemporaneity and the young women living it, characterizes the obtained results as a possible functionality which makes this study a contribution to the knowledge and understanding of gender construction stories and a possible preparatory basis for the definition of dedicated educational projects.