Educational Alliance
Daniela Manno
Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples

The term alliance comes from the Latin verb adligāre (alligāre) meaning ‘to bind to’ and is used to identify different parts ‘binding to one another’ with a view to achieving a common goal. While alliance always refers to a specific form of relationship based on collaboration and respect, the type of parties involved in such alliances may change. This is also true in the educational field.
One initial understanding of the concept of educational alliance was developed as part of the international discussion on the transition in teaching processes, from models focused on transmission to models emphasizing the sphere of dialogue, that took place when scholars began to consider the environment as a non-neutral factor. Analysing the different approaches that converge on the idea of education as a ‘collaborative adventure’, Tiberius and Mancini Billson (1991) focus on the teacher-student relationship and identify certain features that qualify this relationship as an ‘educational alliance’:

• mutual respect and commitment to goals;
• shared responsibility for learning;
• effective communication;
• the willingness to negotiate and understand each other;
• a feeling of trust within the relationship.

Engaging with this concept of alliance, other authors have stressed the importance of considering not only student-teacher relationships but also the relationships among students (e.g. Baepler & Walker, 2014).
While these interpretations frame educational alliance as part of the formal educational sphere and narrow the focus to the Italian context in particular, the concept can also refer to collaboration between the formal and informal spheres. In fact, in Italy the term educational alliance is used most commonly to reference school-family relationships. In keeping with what Pati (2019) defines as a process of participatory improvement, these relationships have developed from a phase of formal participation when introduced in the 1970s to a phase of cooperation at the turn of the new millennium to then enter the phase of so-called ‘educational co-responsibility’ beginning in 2007. The choice to refer to this collaboration as an alliance is meant to emphasize even further how crucial it is for there to be mutual engagement in designing authentically formative learning times and spaces that are based on a recognition of each participant’s different culture and role and aimed at fostering exchange and negotiation (Amadini et al., 2019; Capperucci et al., 2018). The prevailing idea is that educational alliances must avoid becoming rigid, instead remaining dynamically open to any transformation that is needed to improve their capacity to respond to new needs.
Following this perspective of dynamism, there is also a growing drive to involve other actors from the local area so as to ensure that the alliance favors a global approach to educational planning that takes into account the multi-faceted nature of each subject and supports the development of his/her potential. The alliance thus becomes a way for the educational care community to be and act, taking on a deeply inclusive value: it ‘binds together’ a plurality of diverse needs and demands as if they were the knots of a net rather than funneling them into one indistinct beam, and uses this net to ‘weave’ the conditions that guarantee everyone the opportunity to engage in their own forms of learning and participation.
This is the challenge we seek to tackle with the RE-SERVES project: to build dialogue in support of a joint project bringing together formal, non-formal and informal environments to combat the emergence and spread of antisocial behavior in adolescents.

Selected references

Amadini, M., Ferrari, S., & Polenghi, S. (Cur.). (2019). Comunità e corresponsabilità educativa. Soggetti, compiti e strategie. Pensa Multimedia. https://www.siped.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-Milano-Siped-Atti.pdf.

Baepler, P., & Walker, J.D. (2014). Active Learning Classrooms and Educational Alliances: Changing Relationships to Improve Learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 137, 27- 40. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20083

Capperucci, D., Ciucci, E., & Baroncelli, A. (2018). Relazione scuola-famiglia: alleanza e corresponsabilità educativa. Rivista Italiana di Educazione Familiare, 2, 231-253. https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/rief/article/download/4145/4145/.

Pati, L. (2019). Scuola e famiglia. Relazione e corresponsabilità educativa. Morcelliana.

Tiberius, R.G., & Mancini Billson, J. (1991). The Social Context of Teaching and Learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 45, 67-86. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.37219914509