Inclusion: a new reverse perspective

Reverse inclusion has been recently proposed as a powerful tool to pursue many relevant goals at the same time, precisely to assure deserving students higher educational standards and stimuli, to strengthen the initiatives for supporting and including protégé students, to assess new pedagogical methods and teaching contents for the benefit of the whole students’ community. This paper is aimed at presenting and discussing an on-going project carried out at an Italian technical University, the Politecnico of Torino, suffering from a high student to teacher ratio. This problem is mostly imputable to the increasing enrolment of freshmen coming from many different regions and countries, who show varied cultural background and abilities. In the present project, therefore, the concept of reverse inclusion was adopted as the cornerstone of the activities conceived and performed, in order to assure the larger number of students as possible a tailored range of flanking measures. The preliminary results of this experience may represent an empirical demonstrator of the effectiveness of reverse inclusion in the field of Engineering education, as well as a sound tool for mapping the impact and the overall benefits of such approach. The project has been developed starting from the academic year 2014/15, and it was firstly aimed for talented students, that is to enrich the curricula of the top 4% freshmen, on the about 4500 enrolled each year, with hybrid activities. This was quite easy to do, since all the Engineering Bachelor’s degree programmes of our University share a first-year path equal for all the different majors, and the curriculum differentiation progressively occurs during the second year. However, keeping in mind the objective to develop the project in a real reverse inclusion perspective, the selected deserving students are asked to follow the standard lessons together with all the other students, whereas they were grouped in homogeneous classes only for specific supplementary lectures and laboratories, with the aim of deepening their scientific background, fostering critical thinking, and stimulating interdisciplinary approaches. Besides the benefits for the deserving students deriving by these talent-oriented activities, two other relevant results were achieved. The inclusion of the motivated talented students for the majority of the regular lectures and inside the standard classes ensured a driving force for the protégé students, who were involved in mixed groups for discussing and studying. This spontaneous inclusion assures them a support in improving their performances, as traceable throughout the analysis of their career. In addition, as the group of talented students alone constitutes a separate class only for additional teaching activities, innovative educational contents and pedagogical methods, as well as reviewed courses were proposed them inside the project. This was used to set up and optimize these experiences before extending them to the whole students’ audience. Preliminary positive achievements are here discussed, based on one complete cohort of students, the first ones include in the project, and partially on the second one.