We learn from authoritative source that some children, in order to solve situations of uneasiness, common to so many other children of their own age, adopt deviant solutions. It may be the incapacity to cope social roles, it may be the difficulty to maintain their self-integrity or the fracture between the ideal expectations and those  ones they really experimented. In this confusion of different ways of behaviour on the boundary between normality and abnormality, school assumes a remarkable role.

In our school, very often, we have to focus our interest not only on the children who learn easily, but above all on the child in difficulties who is not interested and provokes people around him in order to attract their attention on him. It happens very often that the difficult child defies the educator with irritating and provoking behaviour. These children, in fact, often have a bad relation with reality and consequently they are in a state of anxiety and insecurity which can have different manifestations.

Our experience says that in these cases it’s very important focusing on the construction of a significant relation in which the teacher is as much as possible authoritative but also understanding, able to conciliate these children with the world of the adults, and to give them confidence and sense of rules. These are our firm believes which help us but very often the educational and teaching job is difficult, made up of very small progresses and sometimes of distressing relapses. Our great satisfaction however is to verify that on the human level, very small processes of positive change have been put into effect.

While teaching we have experimented activities useful to the approach with the most difficult children but also very important for the whole class in the logic of prevention against deviance through the development of the reflections on their own emotions.

Among several activities we think that dramatization is the most important. A workshop has been carried out by the teachers of Italian, Art and Music together, based on the making of a text invented by the children ( so  this is the mirror of their world and the projection of their fears, wishes and hopes)  and of its stage realization using different techniques. During these activities, the opportunity to play some roles, to be active and critical persons about the planned work, is a very important element itself for the growth and a stimulus for the comparison, the planning and the flexibility.

Another important part of our work has been carried out about adolescence: we read passages, articles and watched films which caused discussions, written essays and poems, often illustrated by pictures. The important aim of this work has been to give free play to their emotions and experiences which have been elaborated and compared in class and have been used to develop an atmosphere of acceptance solidarity but also of development of each student.