Resilience Thinking and Sustainable School Infrastructure Management

Abstract

This short essay outlines a framework for adopting a resilient approach to the management of secondary school infrastructures, bearing in mind that identifying resilient features and actions of infrastructure in educational establishments is a path which has only recently been embarked upon and that currently there are only a few theoretical and practical references available. This framework has been developed on the basis of both theoretical references and resilient general strategies, as well as the numerous and widely disseminated good practices that have been mainly carried out in Italian schools. Although the latter are often characterized by partial responses to problems instead of systemic and integrated solutions that distinguish resilient approaches, they provide a framework of feasible solutions that can be used to outline the capabilities and possibilities of intervention. The article, first of all, outlines the functions that an evolutionary resilient approach, geared towards achieving sustainable school infrastructures and able to capture the opportunities of development and improvement from their problems and critical situations, can have in their management. Second, it describes the main intervention criteria that should characterize this kind of resilient approach. In this regard, two aspects are explored. The first one is the capacity of the school to be able to integrate socially and functionally with the neighbourhood, succeeding in becoming a point of reference in dealing with social- and educational-critical situations and a stimulus to seize the opportunities for cultural and educational development embedded in the dynamics of change. The second one is the capacity to develop stable subsidiary management of the school infrastructures and the important role of effective planning.