DESIRES AS A GUIDE: INVESTIGATING THE OPINIONS OF GUIDANCE COUNSELLORS ON PATHWAYS FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES

The recent enactment of Legislative Decree No. 62 of 3 May 2024 offers new insights on the nature of guidance pathways for students with disabilities. The decree, indeed, makes explicit reference to the desires, expectations and preferences of the person with a disability, emphasising that these should serve as a compass in structuring an individual, personalised and participatory life project. This renewed interest could also spark a rethinking of guidance pathways from an inclusive perspective. Indeed, the design of such pathways could become a moment for expressing and enhancing the dimension of personal desire, with the aim of supporting the student with a disability in constructing their own life trajectory, one in which they are an active protagonist in their own choices, free from external influences and contextual constraints, with the goal of developing their agentive potential to improve the quality of life. In particular, for the purposes of this study, investigating the dimension of desire is of particular interest, as it is desire itself that defines the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the individual. For this reason, by recognising the generative power of desire itself, guidance cannot be reduced to a mere informational tool but must instead make room for the expression of the person’s deepest dimension, their curiosity, their drive to know and transform the world. This paper aims to present the initial results emerging from an exploratory survey conducted within the schools and training institutions of the Elis consortium in Rome, in collaboration with the National Centre for Guidance. The research, developed according to the Participatory Action Research methodology, involved administering a questionnaire to students and conducting interviews with the guidance counsellors involved in the organised guidance pathways. This contribution will present the results emerging from the thematic analysis of the data collected from the interviews, carried out with the support of MAXQDA software. The objective, therefore, is to investigate whether guidance counsellors believe that the desires of students, particularly those with disabilities, are taken into account and, therefore, contribute to the construction of the proposed guidance pathways.