Cohort: ESOL 37°

Topic of the thesis: Social Network Analysis in Italian schools: investigating teachers’ networks and their effects

Abstract: Teachers are significant social actors and their educative role is fundamental in shaping the future of their students. This project intends to study teachers from the point of view of the networks that they create with their colleagues inside schools. Social network can be considered a vehicle of social capital and, for what concerns teachers, in particular, access to knowledge, ideas, and examples of effective pedagogic approaches and other instruments to improve teaching. Collaboration between teachers can also be a factor that increases their self-efficacy, thus improving schools’ effectiveness. The aim of this project is therefore to use Social Network Analysis to investigate lower secondary school’s teachers’ networks, in order to verify the fact that schools with different levels of scholastic effectiveness share similarities in their teachers’ networks and that these social networks affect teachers’ self-efficacy. The relationships among teachers working in the same school will be investigated, through ego networks surveys. Teachers will indicate the colleagues with whom they interact the most for both personal and professional reasons, thus forming their individual scholastic network. Through Social Network Analysis the networks of all the teachers will be united to recreate the style of network of each school. Furthermore, data from every school will be collected in order to assess schools’ efficacy, measured comparing students’ scholastic results with the mean of the results in the same territory and the social, economic, and cultural status of the students (ESCS indicator). These data indicate the effect produced by schools in the outcome of their students, net of their individual characteristics, representing each school's efficacy in teaching. In this way network data and effectiveness data from each school will be analyzed, to verify similarities between schools with the same results and the fact that school’s effectiveness can be correlated with the type of its teachers’ network. It is therefore intended to investigate if schools with different patterns of social network share similar levels of effectiveness or if their effectiveness change when the social networks differ.

Research interests: Education and educational inequalities; Gender and gender inequalities; Social Network Analysis.

Graduated from: University of Milan (BA); University of Milan Bicocca (MA).

Degrees obtained: BA in Political Science – MA in Analysis of Social Processes.

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