Moving Stories

Whatever the educational level at which they operate, seasoned teachers often enter the classroom at the beginning of the year with a slight sense of trepidation. Such agitation is not due to any sense of professional inadequacy or anxiety regards curricular obligations, but rather to the awareness that they will be called upon to face new challenges, summon up effective resourc- es, smooth unrequited obstacles, and guarantee a fruitful, stim- ulating and inclusive environment for that particular year’s in- coming students. This was the situation the authors of this paper recently found themselves in when greeting the 40 students that made up the first year of the Master's degree in Modern Languages for Inter- national Cooperation and Communication at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples, Italy. Though apparently com- pact and mutually supportive, the learning community was al- so characterised by a number of intersecting issues which, apart from dominant and retiring personalities, non-normative sexual orientations and diverse levels of economic privilege, also in- cluded two disabled students who, though fully integrated into the academic environment, clearly had individual exigencies and specific requirements.