ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

This article offers an exploratory study so that the analysis of individual reflexivity, according to Archer’s approach – internal conversation – (2000, 2003, 2007), may throw greater light on the relationship between teachers and the educational system in Italy and on the processes of enactment. The interaction between actor and structure is, in fact, analysed according to the perspective of critical realism which allows one to avoid falling into conflated perspectives. More specifically, this article presents the professional history of a meta-reflexive teacher, that is, a teacher who is value-oriented, who continually faces a situation of constant incongruity between his values (equity, quality, solidarity, emancipation, etc.) and the educational context. Because of this “contextual incongruity” this teacher mediates the status quo to change the context, but the cultural and structural conditioning prevents him from giving full meaning to his role and from fully investing his own identity in it.