Storie 02/10/2025 0 Comments

“I searched high and low for this opportunity to build myself a new, better life. PhD was what enabled me to do that”

Loris is from Shkodër, a small town in Albania, but if you heard her speaking, you would never guess that she has only been living in Italy for two years. Although Italian television channels are very popular there, they are neither translated nor subtitled and, after a while, people start to understand Italian and even pick up the accent.

“I know everything about Italian trash TV and the media world, along with a whole generation of singers like Celentano, Romina and Eros Ramazzotti!”

However, Loris, also studied Italian since childhood, either self-taught or with the help of her mother, who always told her how knowledge of foreign languages would give her the opportunity to communicate with people from different backgrounds. But if this was an obligation, what she enjoyed most were math exercises, which she always took as a game. As she grew up, this predisposition turned into a passion for the subject and its teaching. She decided to pursue her university studies first in Mathematics and then in Mathematics Education, for which she moved to Tirana. After completing her master’s degree, she wanted to work or do research in the capital—a more European city than the others—but at the time, everything was closed. So, she decided to return to Shkodër, where she started working in a private middle school.

“For me teaching is a sacred profession because, after parents, teachers come next, and they must guide and educate the next generation”.

However, her passion and values did not reflect those of the school and, disappointed, she decided to leave. She realized that teachers no longer had the importance they once had, and this led her to a period of desolation. She started working for an Italian company that deals with customs shipments, dedicating most of her time to it. In a short time, she became very good and fast, but also “a ghost of her former self”. Despite this, she continued to believe in her path in mathematics and, alongside her work, began an internship that would allow her to obtain a licence to teach in public schools. Once she had obtained it, she learned about the dire employment situation in Shkodër, where high emigration rates had resulted in very few children in classrooms and many schools closing altogether. Disappointed once again, she realised that it was time to open herself up to new possibilities.

“Since I couldn’t see a way out, or anything that was keeping me in Albania, I started looking to go abroad”.

She heard about an office that helped students emigrate to Italy, where they recommended pursuing a PhD. She decided to give it a try, embarking on a race against time to obtain a student visa and submit her application. To obtain it, the Italian Embassy requires someone to be in the country who can act as a guarantor and lives within 100 km of the university, an Italian language certificate and translated and validated university qualifications. Moreover, a deposit of six thousand euros in her bank account that is frozen until she obtains her Italian residence permit necessary to open a bank account. Fortunately, Loris has an aunt who lives in Forlì whom she could rely on and, in so doing, she was able to submit her doctoral application to the University of Bologna. Initially, she was eligible but did not win the doctoral position. Discouraged, she decided to continue working at the company and accept a job offer at a school so that she could save enough money to leave, on another occasion.

“I insist so much until I get what I want and sometimes, to the point of destroying myself. Every minute was for me a penny of the capital I needed to leave”.

However, she was later informed that she had won the place and a scholarship, she was overjoyed. Loris arrived in Italy in October 2023. For the first month, she lived with her family in Forlì and, contrary to what she had expected, the university did not help her with her documents or the house. Without her aunt’s help, she does not know how she would have managed to obtain her documents, and she is very grateful to her for it. A few months later, she found a place to live in Bologna, received her residence permit and opened an Italian bank account. Finally, she could stop “carrying wads of cash around with her” and start building her life.

Loris is pursuing a PhD in Mathematics Education and is working on a project that aims to create inclusive classrooms for students with visual impairments using new technologies. These are often overlooked in various fields of education and research, and there is little literature or case studies available on the subject. Loris is attempting to fill this gap.

“The perspective of a sighted person is not always the right one, in fact, the same mathematical concept can be interpreted in different ways”.

The project aims to identify teaching techniques that are fully inclusive of people with visual impairments and their different subgroups, useful for their interaction with the rest of the class and applicable to the whole class. One of the main difficulties is the lack of a theoretical basis, together with the sensitivity of the subject matter. This means that various authorisations are required before any interventions or experiments can be carried out in the classroom. She often wonders whether three years will be enough time to cover everything, but she is confident.

“I don’t aim to solve all the problems faced by visually impaired people, but to achieve the blueprint, something that can kickstart a new field within education”.

In Bologna, teaching is not present as a field of research and currently, she and her supervisor are the only ones working on it. Indeed, during her first year, she had to travel to different cities to attend courses and seminars. For her, the reopening of this position was “a sign of destiny and luck”, not only for her mathematics career, but also from a personal and human point of view as a woman. In Bologna, she was able to start living the life she had always wanted, far from the widespread closed-mindedness there is in Albania regarding women’s roles in society. A vision she always found restrictive whereby she seized various opportunities and faced everything on her own.