Jazz'n School: A Curricular Compass for (Re)Routing Educational Practices, Policies, and Cultures

The transformation of contemporary social and cultural contexts, characterized by acceleration, fragmentation, and uncertainty, calls for a reconsideration of educational models, moving beyond rigidity in favor of more flexible and open practices. Schools are required to confront new challenges, manage the unexpected, and foster experimentation, promoting community-centered practices in which improvisational attitudes become guiding principles for daily educational dynamics. The research originates from the “Education as Jazz” frame (Santi & Zorzi, 2016; Santi, 2018), which employs jazz as a metaphor for values and dispositions fundamental to human development and pedagogical design. It develops through a dual approach: on one hand, a top-down theoretical analysis, revisiting and elaborating established conceptual frameworks; on the other hand, a bottom-up integration enabled through Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT). The latter was operationalized through semi-structured interviews with 40 jazz musicians and improvisers with teaching experience, from both national and international contexts, engaging with and inquiring into their perspectives to explore new connections between musical practice and educational dimensions. The findings confirm the core elements of the jazz metaphor as an educational paradigm, validating its potential, while simultaneously revealing new nuances that enrich and expand its dimensions, suggesting the possibility for the metaphor to evolve and transform through the concrete practices and experiences of jazz musicians. The ultimate goal of the research is to provide conceptual tools for the development of a Curricular Compass capable of guiding the design of flexible, inclusive, inventive, and polyphonic curricula. This theorization does not prescribe an immutable direction but invites movement and continuous transformation, allowing the curriculum to be reconsidered as a living, breathing organism in constant relation to the context, the students, and emerging challenges. In this way, the Curricular Compass offers to the curriculum a horizon of possibilities consistent with the fluid nature of the jazz metaphor.