Life project
Marinella Muscarà e Giuseppe Burgio
Kore University of Enna

“Life Project” (LP) is a term that was originally coined in relation to the field of disability as an evolution of the Piano Educativo Individualizzato (PEI – individualized education plan). In fact, Presidential Decree of 24 February 1994 (published for the first time in the Official journal of the Italian Republic on 6 April 1994) outlines the integrated, balanced interventions drafted for pupils with disabilities in reference to a given time frame designed to ensure their right to education and learning. In other words, a PEI is an operational response to personalized teaching, designed and structured for a given child to identify his/her specific peculiarities. It represents the executive expression of a complex vision of the subject aimed at implementing the kind of inclusive educational processes that take into account the individual both as a person and as part of a group.
PEIs are now used in schools for students with disabilities and in educational communities for unaccompanied foreign minors (UFM) in light of the fact that, for different reasons, both categories display special educational needs that would be more effectively met by transitioning to an LP, including in the case of UFMs.
In fact, LPs take into account the desires and needs of subjects to help them to achieve their objectives through an innovative, eco-systemic, interactive, multi-dimensional theoretical matrix and bio-psycho-social approach focused on networking that can be verified over time, as well as being focused on the outcomes and effectiveness of the interventions (with one indicator being an effective improvement in quality of life).
While PEIs describe the potential and limits of the person targeted by the educational intervention, LPs instead shift attention from the way of the educational care intervention to the who of the person. They delve more deeply into the students’ ability to plan autonomously and move beyond the planned educational intervention itself to encompass the entire educational field (formal, non-formal, and informal settings). In fact, LPs have the advantage of framing the pupil as an active subject and ultimately the only person responsible for planning his/her life and future adulthood; additionally, they bring together socio-culturally disadvantaged individuals (such as UFMs) with all their other peers who likewise find themselves in the difficult position of having to think about their own existence in terms of future planning. This position implies (for everyone) the arduous task of imagining, desiring, wanting and – at the same time – taking stock of their own competences, preparing their actions, foreseeing various phases, and managing timing. LPs are thus a useful tool for co-constructing – engaging the various professional figures who interact with minors (educators, teachers, social workers, and psychologists) – realistic planning projects on the basis of narration.
Indeed, narration allows young people to express their life projects, whether conscious or unconscious, reasoned or born of impulsiveness and not yet subjected to the scrutiny of awareness, in a perspective of possible ‘transformation’; in a perspective that is explicitly pedagogical in and of itself. Narrating the self – to oneself and others – entails building one’s own self as becoming true, projection, maturation, and the identity modelling that arises from the labor of existing and giving order and meaning to the self in the act of giving oneself form. In this way, not only are LPs constructed through the direct participation of the minors in question, but they cannot but ‘emerge’ from the magmatic path of co-construction of the self that takes place in the intrapsychic and relational field and that is unveiled through narration. This is the only way to develop an LP that simultaneously represents the outcome of a (self-)educational process, training in observing oneself, knowing how to plan and knowing how to take the necessary steps to achieve one’s objectives. In fact, empowerment is both the means and the end of the project-development process: the set of knowledge, relational skills and competences that allow people to set goals and develop strategies to achieve them using existing resources.
On the basis of LPs, RE-SERVES proposes to develop the fruitful social-relational skills among UFMs to foster the process of acculturation and social inclusion.

Selected references

Burgio, G., (2003). Empowerment e scuola. In AA.VV., Lessico oggi. Orientarsi nel mondo che cambia (pp. 83-89). Rubbettino.

Cambi, F., (2002). L’autobiografia come metodo formativo, Laterza.

Demetrio, D., (2003). Ricordare a scuola. Fare memoria e didattica autobiografica. Laterza.

De Angelis, B., (2017). Metodo narrativo e pratiche inclusive. In L’integrazione Scolastica E Sociale, 16(1), pp. 72-79.

Palmieri, C., (2006). Dal PEI al Progetto di Vita: la prospettiva della cura educativa. In Handicap & Scuola, 126, pp. 9-12.