Bøker av Claudio Baraldi

This edited volume presents the results of a European research project - 'CHILD-UP' (Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading Policies of Participation), which supports the hybrid integration of children with migration backgrounds into schools across Europe.

This book analyzes children's agency as interactional achievement in formal and informal contexts of education and illuminates how agency can be encouraged and supported in these educational contexts. Taking a sociological approach, the author deals with children as social agents rather than learners and considers structures of interaction which encourage and support agency, rather than teaching. The book draws from field research conducted over more than twenty years in a variety of Italian and international contexts. This book is unique in providing a theoretical reflection on the social structures that can support children's agency, as well as a large amount of examples which show how these structures and agency work. 

Luhmann's theory is fascinating and complex. It offers incomparably enlightening insights, references and research opportunities, but reveals its utility only after a quite high competence threshold. Using the reticular form of the glossary, this book makes the theory accessible while maintaining its complexity. Without being obstructed by knowledge gaps or by references to concepts presented elsewhere, readers inside and outside sociology get the required support to explore sociological systems theory and to engage with it. Luhmann himself, in his introduction, praises the form of the glossary to cope with the challenges of the theoretical description of our highly complex society.

It illustrates the complex and sophisticated thinking that characterises Luhmann's work and explains that Luhmann's theory has given an important and original contribution to the study of education from a sociological point of view.