The ideation, naturalization, and invisibilization of Discourses in Italy’s tracked secondary education: a critical scalar account

Abstract The present paper analyzes the Discourses underpinning the tracked secondary education system in Italy through the lens of sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(1). 1–19). Via an examination of education policy documents, historical accounts of policy discourse, classroom discourse data, ethnographic fieldnotes, ministerial websites, and literary texts, this paper considers how the Discourse of classism (with a capital D , á la Gee 1990. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, critical perspectives on literacy and education . London & New York: Routledge) which underlies the foundations of the tracked school system in Italy has gradually become naturalized and then ‘invisible’ (that is, hegemonic) as it has traveled through scales of political and social speech and texts ( discourse with a lowercase d ). This paper considers an alternative view of scales not as spatiotemporal spaces, places, or settings, but as types of metadiscursive labor (Carr 2006. “Secrets keep you sick”: Metalinguistic labor in a drug treatment program for homeless women. Language in Society 35(05). 631–653). This paper also discusses the role of critique, drawing on Pietikäinen’s (2016. Critical debates: Discourse, boundaries and social change. Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates ) concepts of emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque critique, in rendering visible and available for re-scaling the Discourses which become invisible over time.