This presentation results from my “observing participation” into an in-service training course for teachers teaching immigrants’ and Roma children in a number of Turin schools. The paper deals with how some Italian teachers metaphorically conceptualize their pupils’ successful process of learning and socialization, namely in terms of nature’s role rather than in terms of a teacher’s competent choices and decisions. Drawing on the writings of Lakoff and Johnson on the one hand, and Scheffler on the other, as well as from my own research, I intend to analyze such metaphorical conceptualization and point out how it both illuminates and darkens the way some teachers attending an in-service training course think of, and relate to, their classrooms’ everyday reality and goals. Since metaphors are a matter of thought, action and imagination (Lakoff and Johnson), and since the literal dimension they refer to always entails a pragmatic side (Scheffler), my presentation will discuss the extent to which the metaphor of nature gives sense to the process of education, and how it helps us understand the meaning of the educational experience both for the pupils and the teachers, given that metaphors structure most part of our conceptual system as well as our behaviours, expectations, actions and interactions

ethnographic and qualitative methodology

To propose an interpretation of minority pupils' educational experience and teachers' work.