Stanno lavorando? Tempo, spazio e lavoro in un progetto di alternanza scuola-lavoro in Sardegna

In an “alternation school-job” project carried on in a high school in Sardinia (Italy), a group of students has collected life histories about IIWW memories, learning some skills of ethnographic methodology through fieldwork. A part of the teachers believed that field research is not a “real job”. Starting from Gramsci's reflections about relations between intellectual and manual work, we will take into account the different conceptions of time, space, and work operating in the neoliberal school, in the common sense of teachers and executives, and in the ministerial “gray literature”. In the project, operate two different conceptions of “learning by doing”. The first is based on a functionalist approach that uses practical jobs to acquire skills connected to neoliberal division of labor; In the second, the fieldwork can produce a critical point of view about concept of work. The article shows how the informal strategies of ethnographic research can produce an oppositional practice that re-negotiate the ideological assumptions of functionalist and neoliberal approach carried on by the educational State's policies.