From Double Absence to Double Presence: Video-Selfie as Empowerment in a Multicultural Italian Classroom

This paper examines the video-selfie as a tool for empowerment in multicultural secondary school classrooms. We draw on data from the European ICME project, focusing on a vocational secondary school in Italy, where 17 of 18 first-year students – approximately half of whom had migration backgrounds – produced short videos presenting themselves through personally meaningful objects. Students then participated in a structured reflection activity after watching each other's videos in class. We combine three theoretical frameworks: critical media literacy, identity and self-representation studies, and Mezirow's transformative learning theory. Our argument is that the video selfie empowers in multiple ways: it positions students as producers of their own representations, creates space to articulate complex transnational identities, and generates a disorienting dilemma that can trigger significant shifts in self-understanding. An in-depth analysis of four student cases, combined with a corpus of post-activity reflections, revealed both the representational strategies students used and the transformative dimension of the experience. The findings suggest that media production in multicultural classrooms can be a meaningful site of voice, identity work, and self-knowledge – when activities are designed to foreground student authorship and include structured reflection. A central theoretical contribution is the distinction between Sayad's double absence – characteristic of first-generation immigrants – and the double presence observed in our second-generation students: multiple belongings held simultaneously in dialectical tension, rarely given a public form adequate to their complexity.