Our interest in the meanings, concepts, and experiences of responsibility in younger generations arises from the belief that the concept of responsibility itself is ripe for fresh examination based on the voices and experiences of young people, who live today in a profoundly changed society that seems guided by a self-centred “culture of narcissism” (Castoriadis & Lasch 2014) and the attendant loss of a sense of responsibility (Lipovetsky, 2002; Cruz, 1999). Alongside this reading of contemporary society, however, we must also give thorough consideration to new forms of responsibility enacted by the same younger generations, not least the many examples of youth activism and political engagement (in response, in particular, to the climate crisis), which reveal a heartfelt willingness to assume responsibility.

Building on a recent study, the results of which have been partially presented (Dusi & De Vita, 2019), this broader, and more extensive new research project seeks to explore the new forms and configurations that the concept of responsibility has taken on in the minds and experiences of young people who have chosen a career in education.

More specifically, it seeks to:

1.      investigate the forms, meanings, and experiences of responsibility in the lives of the participants

2.      explore whether the exercise of responsibility is intrinsically connected with educational professions (and in what way, and /to what extent).

We are living in a time of transition from a society characterised by the end of politics (Arendt, 2000; Deneault, 2018) and a crisis of democracy (Crouch, 2004) – such is the legacy of the Western political tradition – to one marked by new modes of participation and practical and sustainable living (Bertell, 2016). This decline in the Western political model is manifested in the form of a “de-responsibilised” society. At the same time, however, we are witnessing a new trend of youthful responsibility  (Kitanova, 2020), not least in the context of national and international movements such as Fridays for Future and Ni Una Menos. In their struggle to assert new ways of living in the world, the young participants in these social movements have invested themselves with maximal responsibility for the future of the planet. We, therefore, find younger generations exercising responsibility  (Lüküslü  & Walther, 2020) in a highly polarised manner, ranging in degree from the “maximal” – in the case of these movements – to the “minimal”, as we find in the single, small gestures through which a number of the young people in our study appear to express and discharge the responsibility they feel they have (Dusi & De Vita, 2019).

In stark contrast to older generations, young people are negotiating the landscape of responsibility using a language of their own making that is yet to be fully heard, let alone explored. This same transformation of meaning, concepts and experience extends to, and profoundly alters, the forms that responsibility can assume in the world of education.

With a view to engaging with the full complexity of the phenomenon and the dynamics at work within it, our study adopts a sequential, mixed-method approach (Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007) that – eschewing the “paradigm wars” (Gage, 1989) – combines qualitative (focus groups, interviews) and quantitative (questionnaires) methodologies, with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity. The study involves students from Combined Bachelor’s/Master’s courses in Education at three Italian universities, Bicocca, LUMSA, and the University of Verona. The research team comprises academics from the fields of education (3 researchers), educational psychology (1), moral philosophy (1), a heterogeneous group selected to be equipped to engage with the multiple (social, ethical, or strictly educational) dimensions of educational responsibility. The study is structured in 3 phases: I. 3 focus groups with students from the 3 institutions; data processed using NVivo software. II. An online “set-up” questionnaire administered to students attending Primary Teaching and Education degree courses at 12 Italian higher-education institutions. III. 15 in-depth interviews with selected “key informants”, specifically 5 students nearing the end of their studies at each university involved. It is designed such that one phase follows on from another, the data from the focus groups providing the basis for the design of the questionnaire, the questionnaire guiding the choice of issues to be explored in greater depth in the interviews with key informants. Our article presents the results of the first phase, which involved the delivery of 3 focus groups. The structure of the focus groups was guided by an exploratory study in which a short questionnaire was administered to 413 students from the Primary Teaching course at the University of Verona. 2 versions of the questionnaire were used over the course of the exploratory study. The first, which was administered to 226 students in the 2015-2016 session, consisted solely of 2 open questions. A second version was administered to 167 students over the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 sessions. The focus groups (Krueger, 1994) were structured in 4 sections: 1. Meanings and concepts of responsibility; 2. Dimensions of educational responsibility; 3. Social and political implications of educational responsibility. 4. Teacher accountability. A focus group was conducted at each university with students who had volunteered to take part in the study. Each focus group lasted around 2 hours, with an audio recording, full transcription produced for each one. The total number of participants was 20. The second phase (online questionnaire) is ongoing.

The data analysis reveals a strong interconnection between the decision to study towards an inherently “responsible” profession and other choices regarding the use of free time for social and/or political engagement, a quality that indicates the maturation of an outward-looking ethical-existential outlook in these students. Three macro themes emerged during the analysis: i. the question of time; ii. the dual dimensions of the “call to be responsible”; iii. the split between the personal and socio-political spheres of responsibility. i. To be(come) a responsible person requires time. To make sense of this “Aristotelean” virtue, people need multiple micro-experiences of being responsible, and time to nurture the ability to reflect on their choices and the consequences. ii. Young people seem aware that they have to experience parental injunctions (you must) and to experiment and practice responsibility and autonomy on their own (I must). In this sense, the process works inwards from the outside, and once internalized develops into a personality trait. iii. One significant finding from the focus groups was the separation of individual responsibility and political responsibility. These results run contrary to the values expressed by the new wave of politically engaged young people involved in grassroot movements. It may be that young people are negotiating the transition from a worn-out vision of political life to new understandings of the political. Our findings suggest there is both the need and the opportunity for comparative studies on this subject to collect more information from a variety of perspectives and understand if and how the pact between generations in the public space can be healed. Some bias may be expected given that participation in the focus groups was voluntary, and that students with a greater sensitivity to and awareness of issues of responsibility would be more likely to participate.

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