Some thoughts on the training model organized on assessment and diagnosis in the school context

Abstract

The school and its clients, pupils, and families are facing critical change. The presence of foreign students and cultural diversity is growing. These changes are accompanied by an exponential growth in the use of diagnoses, with the production of an almost infinite descriptive taxonomy: disabilities, learning difficulties, and cultural differences blend, all becoming deficits. Without a clear definition of the problems that the school context, as a system of productive relationships, is facing, one moves towards confusion that leads to placing the cause of every complex educational relationship on the individual pupils, with the production of an infinite number of deficit certificates. In this scenery, diagnosis becomes a tool for activating resources, with the imagination - starting from those - of being able to solve a vast range of problems which, upon closer inspection, are problems of coexistence. This dynamic makes it difficult for the school to think about its complexity, causing it lose sight of its mandate: to train to the wider social context, grasp its changes, and promote them. In this work, an intervention proposal is made which uses the reference to a psychology of the individual-context relationship, based on the hypothesis of the unconscious collusive dynamic that organizes the social and organizational relationship in the school, useful for reading the changes taking place and promoting its objectives of development.