Since the Second World War, Italian urban suburbs have grown at a dizzying pace, creating, on the one hand, a perception of virtuous progress, and on the other, situations full of contradictions and conflicts. These neighborhoods, although with specific differences and peculiarities, often share the same urgent and worrying problem of school dropout. In contexts with serious socio-cultural unease, in fact, schools do not always have enough resources to welcome and include the most difficult children and adolescents. Moreover, in many cases, dropping out of school corresponds to the serious danger, already for the very young, of being approached by organized crime gangs, creating a truly alarming social effect. As mathematics educators we have been involved since 2018 in investigating and reflecting on educational contexts suitable to prevent and contrast this phenomenon and we started asking: what choices to make in designing mathematical activities to prevent school dropout?

We faced this issue within the “Proud of You” (PoY) project, aimed at preventing school drop-out in disadvantaged suburbs of Naples, in the Southern of Italy by addressing learning objectives in the disciplines of Italian language and mathematics. In these areas, the school dropout rate at the secondary level is alarming, and indeed a large number of children already at the primary level do not attend school regularly. In such a context, we decided to address our research question by positioning it in a wider educational perspective, namely by taking into account the specificities of the territory in which students live, and relating them to citizenship education goals. We refer in particular to the emerging strand of informal mathematics education (Nemirovsky, Kelton, & Civil, 2017), and to the perspective of Culturally Responsive Mathematical Education (Gay, 2010). In addition, it is our conviction that the sustainability of such kind of a project lies above all in the actual possibility and willingness of teachers to integrate the innovative activities experimented during the project into their school curriculum. For this reason, the involvement of teachers began several months before the beginning of the activities with the students and was articulated in regular meetings for reflection and co-design.

In informal mathematics education research, learning spaces other than school-based spaces are explored, such as exhibits within science museums or summer camps, and experiences with mathematics are proposed that are different from the traditional ones normally offered by the educational institution. The main characteristics that make informal mathematics education contexts different from school-based mathematics activities are the voluntariness of learner’s participation, the fluidity of disciplinary boundaries, and the absence of traditional forms of assessment.

For all of these reasons, informal contexts are generally valued for their potential to convey alternative visions of mathematics and to engage all learners in ways that are creative and different from usual school practice (Nemirovsky et al., 2017). The hypothesis of our work in PoY is based precisely on this potential: to use informal contexts to support the development of positive attitudes towards the discipline, and more generally towards school, reaching even the most struggling students, in a genuinely inclusive perspective.

In accordance with the perspective of Culturally Responsive Mathematical Education, we decided to "situate" mathematical learning events in the history, culture, and specific needs of the students’ own territory, allowing them to create, recreate, and shape their meanings (Gay, 2010). In this spirit, with the aim of responding to the very strong need of the territory for legality, we have intertwined mathematical objectives with the objectives of emancipation from geographical and social boundaries that too often are for students a suffocating cage that threatens to affect their lives in a decisive way.

The mathematical activities designed have involved so far a total of about 300 children (grades 4-7). Both by visiting some of the most significant areas of the city, and by staying in school spaces in post-school sessions, in PoY children work in small groups and live mathematical experiences that enhance the movement of the whole body and, at the same time, put the emphasis on communication processes. The activities are managed by the school teachers, with the support of a group of tutors (master's degree students in mathematics or primary education). Mathematics education goals have been strictly intertwined with citizenship goals through various means. First, we created for the pupils pleasant, even if only fictitious, meetings with people belonging to local institutions and the cultural world that students never meet in their daily life. In these areas, in fact, institutions are too often experienced as enemies - they prohibit, inflict economic sanctions or, even worse, take away loved ones for periods of detention - and communication through newspapers hardly reaches the youngsters. Students receive letters by a councilor responsible for culture, a surveyor and the director of a local newspaper, asking for their help in solving some mathematical problems concerning the city. For example, the surveyor turns to the pupils to ask for their help in establishing the maximum number of possible guests for a party that needed to be organized on the North pier of Bagnoli in Naples. This is a very large space, approximating to a rectangle with one side almost one kilometer long, which the pupils explored by moving with their whole bodies, and putting into action processes of measurement and estimation. The problem leads to reflect on issues related to the use of public urban spaces according to precise rules that take into account certain criteria of safety and legality. In this scenario, each student plays the role of an architect belonging to a work team. The teams of young architects carry out inspections in the city, through small trips or staying at school through GoogleMaps. As this example shows, PoY activities are also conceived as an opportunity for the students involved to get out of their suburbs, often experienced as ghettos, and discover the cultural and natural heritage of the city to which they belong.

At the request of PoY's funding agency (and in contrast with informal mathematics principles), students were subjected to an assessment of their mathematics learning. Quantitative analysis of the data shows some improvement in the students who participated more assiduously in the project. In addition, bigger school attendance was registered on the days when PoY activities took place in the afternoon, indicating its positive effects in reducing school drop-out. Beyond measurable results, we would like to discuss with our colleagues at the conference the proposed vision of bridging mathematics education and citizenship education, and our related choices. We placed in strong opposition to methodologies (unfortunately widely used) that propose to students with difficulties in mathematics cognitive shortcuts that dampen or cancel any complexity; on the contrary, our choice was to propose complex problems, and to prompt argumentative and communicative processes, even in the awareness - and indeed because of that - of the great linguistic difficulties of most students (they all speak a dialect at home, rather than Italian language). This choice seems to us to be consistent with a didactic approach attentive to democratic ideals and contributing to the development of citizenship values necessary for being included and play an active part of our society. Finally, we want to emphasize the great potential that a project like PoY can have for the teacher professional development and, as a spillover, on their students even in the future. The voluntary nature of participation not only requires, but makes it obligatory for researchers and teachers to reflect on the meaning and accessibility of the mathematical activities offered to pupils. Is this this not a task to which all educators should pay close attention? Especially in an area with high rates of school dropout, but also elsewhere and at every level of education?

Cai, J. (2017). (Ed.). Compendium for Research in Mathematics Education. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Capocci, A. (2019, 21 aprile). La realtà dei campi senza riga e compasso. Il Manifesto. Reperibile online al sito: https://ilmanifesto.it/la-realta-dei-campi-senza-riga-e-compasso/. Castelnuovo, E. (1963). Didattica della matematica. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Castelnuovo, E. (2003). Le esposizioni di matematica. Perché?. Atti del Convegno Emmatematica. L’insegnamento di Emma Castelnuovo: «Vedere oltre le figure e i numeri», Liceo Scientifico A. M. Enriques Agnoletti, Sesto Fiorentino, 26 ottobre 2001. Firenze: Edifir, pp. 133-153. Di Martino, P., & Zan, R. (2010). ‘Me and maths’: towards a definition of attitude grounded on students’ narratives. Journal of Mathematics Teachers Education, vol. 13, n. 1, pp. 27-48. Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press. Lakoff, G., & Núñez, R. (2000). Where mathematics come from? How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. New York: Basic Books. Lorenzoni, F. (2019). I bambini ci guardano. Sellerio Editore Palermo. Nemirovsky, R., Kelton, M. L., & Civil, M. (2017). Towards a vibrant and socially significant informal mathematics education. In J. Cai (Ed.), Compendium for Research in Mathematics Education, pp. 968-980, Reston, VA, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Skovsmose, O., & Penteado, M. G. (2012). Mathematics education and democracy: an on-going challenge, International Journal for Mathematics in Education, vol. special issue, n. 4, pp. 15-29. Reperibile online al sito: http://www.hms.gr/sites/default/files/subsites/publications/issues_files/HMS_i_JME_vol4_0.pdf. Skovsmose, O. (2019). Inclusions, Meetings and Landscapes. In D. Kollosche, R. M. J. de Souza, M. Knigge, M. G. Penteado, & O. Skovsmose (Eds.), Inclusive Mathematics Education, pp. 71-84. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.