Small and rural schools often experience what is commonly perceived as inequality school curriculum towards urban schools due to bad connectivity and poor technological equipment, high teachers’ turnover or inadequate teacher training in the use of new technologies for innovative teaching, risking increasing levels of non-attendance in remote areas of our country (Mangione & Cannella, 2021).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the closure of schools and remote teaching as the only way to guarantee students schooling opportunities generated educational inequalities among students, and Italy reported an increased level of social exclusion (Save the Children, 2020). The research activity carried out by INDIRE on the forms of diffused and extended schooling (Mangione, Chipa, Cannella, 2022; Mangione, Cannella, Chipa, 2021) has made it possible to deepen those experiences that make use of third-party spaces to build a “community ecosystem” (Teneggi, 2020). During the pandemic the learning experience of lower secondary schools in Reggio Emilia as “extended school in third spaces” has been financially supported by the local administration and carried out to extend the classrooms out of the school walls to guarantee the continuity of the educational offer. It involved 11 comprehensive schools of the city and 19 spaces outside the school starting from the 2020-2021 school year. The model has been observed and monitored to be transferred and small and rural school context.

The research, of a phenomenological type, aims to investigate the elements characterizing the widespread school (Black, Lemon & Walsh, 2010) with attention to inter professional collaboration enhanced by the use of third spaces redesigned as permanent laboratory classrooms. A reasoned sampling allowed the researchers to identify three contexts among Italian schools, housed in different types of decentralized classrooms - outdoors (farm holidays), in cultural spaces (civic museums) and in maker spaces (ateliers). These cases of widespread school have been the object of indirect observation through a device of a narrative nature.

In a second phase, the research assumed a more evaluative character of interprofessional collaboration using a set of tools already used in UK context (Cheminais, 2009) to monitor and evaluate any interprofessional collaboration in a school context. Using tools such as “the ladder of participation”, a “Diamond Ranking”, to evaluate the level of cohesion among the member of the group, a “Force Field Analysis”, to help the mixed group of teacher and experts to reflect on their collaboration activities allowed the team to list weak and strong side of their interprofessional experience.

The use of the abovementioned tools was accompanied by qualitative tools such as interviews with teachers, experts and local administration, allowed the group to intercept the component of interprofessional collaboration and how trigger a transformative process that is still ongoing by involving all the school's stakeholders.

From the cases it emerges that frequent communication, documentation, and systematic exchange of information may be elements that support effective collaborative processes, but they are still immature and not very systemic tools even if they are supported by the great collaboration between institutions that move with the same objective.

UNESCO 2021 report has at its core a vision of education as a common good, shared by society well outside school. The challenge is defining educational spaces with these characteristics and what the perimeter of societal engagement should be. In Reggio Emilia schools, the Municipality and the city have been in dialogue for the past 75 years to share children's education responsibility reflecting on spaces, content and time. Officina Educativa (OE), educational service of the Municipality, has an educational co-designed perspective: education as a right to well-being, to participation, and to learning, in its relationship to the territory.

The 6-14 educational system provided by OE is a public project based on shared founding values and on a strong alliance between adults (policy makers, school managers, teachers, educators, pedagogical coordinators, stakeholders), set up by the “Pact for Education and Knowledge”, signed by the Municipality and the Comprehensive Institutes of Reggio Emilia, that gives the political, educational and cultural framework to the collaboration.

The pandemic became an opportunity for OE to promote scuola diffusa/widespread school (WS). Municipality, schools and the city joined forces and signed “Community education pacts” that guarantee every child the same access to education, by multiplying and spreading through the city the educational contexts. Cultural and working spaces became learning environments for prolonged time (weeks, months, a year) to foster innovative learning experience, participation and shared culture for students and their families.

Through the years agreements have been renewed, expanding the natural school context to the whole city as a suitable and appropriate place of learning. The co-designing process has helped define curricular, cross-curricular and multi-disciplinary areas related to the places. Theaters, museums, exhibitions, ateliers, farms host every year 100 classes overall, that spend in this Education Outside the Classroom (EOtC) experience one week each.

The gains for students in these settings are known. Whether this exposure to informal and non-formal education changes teachers’ teaching and assessment methodology has not been so widely researched. The potential lasting improvements in the quality of relations within the classrooms, both among students and with the teachers, creating a more inclusive and democratic school ecosystem, can also be further explored.

This ongoing research describes the educational ecosystem created by the educational pacts and OE through WS. We will present data from focus groups and a survey, with primary and lower secondary school teachers, to explore the characteristics of WS that can grant: lasting gains in teaching and assessment methodology; and improvement in the quality of relations and inclusion within the classrooms. The survey investigates self-efficacy and agency. These teachers have confirmed lasting changes in the investigated areas after WS. Preliminary results show that lasting changes in teaching and assessment methodologies occure when teachers: share the design and responsibility of WS; could witness educators' actions and co-conduct the activities. In terms of classroom relations, the lasting gains seem to be for highly diverse newly formed student groups. Experience in outdoor settings and with performing arts also have a stronger impact on relations.

Recent studies and research in education and neuroscience have led to an extended and complex idea of the learning environment, encompassing both physical space and relational aspects. The space is redefined in an ecological-systemic perspective for the interdependent interaction of all key components of the school-system (students, teachers, tools, content…) (OECD, 2010), that opens up beyond “traditional” school.

This paper intends to illustrate the actions that led to the definition of a sustainable (valid, actualized, shared and feasible) idea of Widespread School, founding concept of the three-year European ERASMUS+ project "Widespread School: innovating teaching approaches outside the classroom". Building on the literature regarding the educational and transformative value arising from synergies between diverse contexts, and Interprofessional Collaboration (WHO, 2010) in support of the idea of schools as hubs of empowerment and learning connected with community and other local services (OECD, 2020), the project Widespread School aims at strengthening the alliance between school and territory and experiment an approach to education based on the idea of Education Outside the Classroom (EOC). Evidence shows that EOC effectively enhances the capacity to learn. Schools and territories can implement a virtuous process where the variety of teaching, learning and assessment strategies positively influence, encourage and support the development of key competencies in both teachers and students. Inequality and illiteracy in the world are at historically high and rising levels (UN, 2020), even in countries with a strong educational and inclusive tradition, such as Italy (Invalsi, 2023). A viable idea of widespread school could be a lever for co-development, well-being and prevention. Starting from theories, models and experiences from the European landscape, the concept should be defined to support and implement its effective development at the cultural, political and practical level (Index model).

The first phase of the project was therefore dedicated to the exploration of the different interpretations of the construct of "Widespread School" in the European context, for the identification of its essential characteristics (also in terms of "sustainability"), while contemplating and enhancing the heterogeneity of its theoretical and applicative declinations.

The research and analysis process we present has two branches: the exploration of national and international literature; and the collection of exemplary practices both from partners' territories (Italy, Spain, Croatia and Finland) and Europe wide.

A number of keywords were identified that guided both the collection and literature analysis phase and the development of a practice collection form. The form provides a general and provisional definition of widespread school and poses questions for the identification of some pillar elements: Educational Ecosystem (formal, non-formal, informal agents involved in the experience); Educational Objectives of the experience; Methodology/Pedagogical strategies/procedure/tools of experience and design process; Timeframe.

The identification of a common frame for systematizing and defining widespread school is also aimed at building a Toolkit (consisting of guidelines and materials for further reading and implementation) available for teachers on a purpose-built website. The toolkit will support the development of practitioners and contexts in a coherent and sustainable “widespread” perspective.

From 2021, the UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education, highlights the importance of participatory processes, aiming to engage all stakeholders in the governance of education. considers the social contract as a tool able to transform education and bring it at a greater level of cooperation, where the importance of horizontal networks among diverse stakeholders comes back predominantly, in order to reach more sustainable futures (UNESCO,2021)

The challenge that the UNESCO document poses finds an important ally in the cohesion policies for the inner areas. On the one hand, intervention measures support the strengthening of local education systems in order to counter depopulation; on the other hand, the same rationale of the National Strategy for Internal Areas (SNAI) insists on the implementation of multi-stakeholders participatory processes within the co-planning of interventions for local development (Del Gobbo, 2019)

The contribution aims to illustrate the particular case of Casentino, valley of Tuscany included in SNAI, where the existence and multi-level support to a precise inter-municipal policy insistent on the territorial reinforcement of the educational offer (Unione dei Comuni Montani del Casentino, 2017) is concretizing in the construction of an area educational ecosystem focused on the enhancement of intangible cultural heritage as a training device and as an asset of place-based development.

The path - promoted since 2018 by the local Unione dei Comuni del Casentino with the scientific coordination of the FORLILPSI Department of the University of Florence - has allowed the prefiguration of a new model of governance of the local education system based on an Educational Pact. The process leading to the Territorial Educational Pact engaged ten municipalities, six schools - (four comprehensive and two higher education) and more than twenty subjects of the third sectors. This partnership allowed the experimentation of a new model of governance, whose goals, objectives, organizational and intervention forms are the result of the extended and continuous multistakeholders collaboration.

The process leading to the Territorial Educational Pact and the deployment of its implementing forms sees goals, objectives, sectors, organizational forms and intervention as a result of the extended and continuous collaboration of ten municipalities, six schools (four inclusive and two higher education) and over twenty subjects from the Third Sector.

The Territorial Pact is an interesting case study to identify models of governance of the education system that can improve and enhance educational opportunities in inner areas. In this perspective, the Pact has been the subject of a study conducted with desk analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews within the REACT interdepartmental research. The results highlight the characteristics of thematic and organizational innovation, but also the critical factors determined by the involvement of communities in participatory processes. A result expected by the research is also given by the definition of the skills necessary to activate and manage governance processes in a logic of "learning networks" and territorial capacity building.

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear the importance of developing a new social contract for education, involving greater cooperation among social actors in creating and re-engaging collective action for the common good (UNESCO, 2021). The UNESCO report on the futures of education emphasizes the public character of education and the importance of reviving the community-based compact (Locatelli, 2023). A new concept of educational ecosystem is envisioned, characterized by the participation in the educational process of different social actors with their diverse roles and to the strengthening of a shared operational methodology, involving the entire community, aimed at creatively re-imagining education. The basis of that operational methodology is the promotion of interdependence value among social actors which contributes to a more effective approach to addressing educational challenges, in an intergenerational logic. This contribution aims to illustrate the R.E.T.I. Project – Educational Research for an Inclusive Territory – with the purpose of reflecting on the meaning and forms that the process of creating a new social-educational pact can assume. R.E.T.I. started 3 years ago at the request of the Social Services of the Municipality of Porto Torres in Sardinia in order to prevent youth marginalization, addressing educational poverty and rebuilding the alliance between schools, families and community actors. The itinerary of this experimentation is coordinated by LUMSA University, in collaboration with the Pontifical Scholas Occurrentes Foundation and the support of Eniscuola. The employed tools are: Service-Learning, Photovoice and the Scholas methodology languages of art, play and creative thinking. These tools, in the first two year project, made it possible to support the school’s central role in the educational process and help it be recognized as such by the educating community. In the first annuality, the active participation of young people was promoted, listening to their needs, those of other stakeholders and equipping them with new pedagogical-social tools. In the second annuality, the ability of schools to narrate themselves was supported. A space for dialogue between schools and the local community was created. The needs of school stakeholders, resources and critical issues to be addressed were defined and possible transformative actions for the community were reflected upon. In its third year, the Project is moving towards the creation of a participatory model of educational governance in close collaboration between the different social actors involved in the educational process (Social Services of the Municipality, associative realities) in order to arrive at the definition of a new community educational pact, in which each of the social actors is co-responsible and interdependent. The R.E.T.I. path of participatory training and design of the operational method can represent a pilot model of educational governance aimed at promoting the empowerment of the educating community, with a view to building a new social contract for education that involves the entire community: the school, families, different educational agencies, local authorities and all other stakeholders (Lowe, 2000). Definitely, R.E.T.I. well represents the possibility of a new educational governance that promotes cooperation among the educational system, public administration, third sector entities, and community stakeholders.