Chronicity at school: from barrier to learning resource

The management of chronicity at school is characterized by uneven practices. Despite the unanimous consensus on the importance of encouraging the chronically ill child to participate in school activities the adopted strategies appear more oriented towards a logic of simple placement than of real inclusion. The adoption of the healthcare paradigm in the approach to the topic leads to mainly focusing on the necessary ways to compensate for the deficit, offering technical skills and knowledges that the children themselves, with the support of parents and teachers, will have to adapt in their school context. This approach leaves in the shade the existential dimension of the disease, which is connected to the necessity to learn how to manage the need and reconcile it with the requires of the school experience. From this point of view, the international literature on this topic highlights how the management of chronicity at school involves difficulties relating not only to the treatment of the disease and to the ways parents and teachers are involved in the cure, but also to the care of the psycho-socio-educational aspects of the sick child which are crucial for the learning processes. The spaces and times of cure are intertwined with the learning ones in a fragile balance, never definitively acquired, due to the contingent interaction between numerous social and material actors. The suspension of activities to carry out the necessary self-care practices, the sense of diversity when compared to peers, the difficult access to some experiences, the tension perceived among adults for managing time at school, can constitute obstacles in the learning process which, in some cases, can contribute to situations of educational poverty. The adoption of a socio-material approach makes possible the tracing of the multiple interactions between the different social and material actors contributing to the production of school experiences, and the analysis of the existing dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion, allowing the intervention, in support of the subject’s learning processes. Starting from the analysis of a specific type of chronicity, type-1 diabetes, in relation to the educational dimensions it causes on the subject and to the learning processes of self-management adopted by children and teenagers, the contribution intends to highlight the input that the socio-material perspective can offer in problematizing the inclusion issue regarding chronically ill children in school and in identifying strategies that promote participation and learning. Among these strategies, at a methodological level, the integrated action with all the actors involved in the management of chronicity at school and the opening of new fields of educational experiences are explored as a possibility to unhinge disabling representations of the disease and to promote forms of cooperative learning, involving the entire considered context. From this point of view, chronicity can turn from a barrier into a learning resource, not only for the child in such conditions, but for the entire class group.