Email: M.G.Tongiani@soton.ac.uk
Maria Giulia is a first-year Doctoral Student. Her research focuses on how teachers’ discourse and behaviors influence students’ academic path and their relationship with the school as an institution.
Maria Giulia’s current research focuses on exploring ways to conjugate ethnographic research with Student Voice to understand how middle school pupils make sense of their relationship with teachers and how it influences their academic path.
This research stems from the shared understanding that teachers’ institutional habitus influences their judgments of students, and those judgments contribute to defining student identity and effort. In Italy, students who recall negative incidents tend to be more hostile and claim they chose the wrong path due to lower secondary school teachers who advised them based on their performance and not their dispositions.
Combining participant observation with attention to student words means actively listening to and observing them while keeping an eye on teachers. That could result in highlighting the effects of day-to-day interactions and official discourse on individual narratives in the school context.
Before joining the Faculty of Education, Maria Giulia obtained an MA in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology, and Ethnolinguistics, graduating with honors from Ca' Foscari University of Venice and University of Padua, with a research thesis on the relationship of upper secondary school students with the school institution, following an honors BA Degree in History from the same university.
Maria Giulia has a long history of volunteering in small and international organizations, that have left her with a deep understanding of human rights and a great motivation towards critical social research, innovation for social equality, and growth through diversity as a source of learning and reflection.
During the fieldwork for the MAs thesis, placing herself among young students has led Maria Giulia to discover how a researcher can establish a relationship of unique qualities, esteem, collaboration, and mutual growth with younger people. During that time, she worked among students who have shown her a great desire to be heard and to have original input on the changes that could draw the education system closer to their experience of a changing world.