Active participation of university students in academic decision-making processes is crucial for combating school dropout, a key indicator of educational quality (Aina et al., 2022). This involvement not only mitigates the negative consequences of dropout but also fosters students' commitment and sense of belonging to their educational journey.

Inclusive approaches, viewing students as active researchers and co-creators of curricula, challenge traditional power dynamics and enhance students' self-determination, facilitating more meaningful learning and cultural and structural transformations within institutions (Nurmalitasari et al., 2023; Wallace & Chhuon, 2014; MacBeath et al., 2003; Ahmadi, 2021; Fielding & Bragg, S., 2003; Rudduck and Fielding, 2006). The collaboration between students and faculty highlights the importance of student voices in reforming education and reducing dropout, underscoring the need to integrate such practices into policies and educational research for a more inclusive and responsive academic future (Grion et al., 2023).

This study investigates the approach of university students as co-researchers, highlighting how this methodology can democratize research and enrich evidence for educational interventions, encouraging active student participation and valuing their contributions. Through an Experimental Pedagogy workshop at the University of Perugia, Primary Education Science students explored their unique insights into the teaching profession and their future vocation.

The methodology involved a three-phase approach, where students initially reflected on teacher qualities and their impact on their personal journey, through a questionnaire, then analyzed international teaching standards with the Teacher and Learning International Survey (TALIS) as a reference framework, and finally collected data from secondary school students on perceptions and aspirations regarding how teacher training is/should be.

This comprehensive effort has facilitated a multi-level understanding of educational needs from the perspective of those who have a direct impact on teaching practices.

The findings have highlighted the need to integrate contemporary educational challenges into teacher training, emphasizing relational skills, pedagogical innovation, and the need for continuous professional development. The study underscores the value of student voices in identifying gaps in current educational frameworks and suggests a reorientation towards more inclusive and student-centered policy formulations (Manefield et al. 2007, Flutter, 2007; Treacy & Leavy, 2023), as well as highlighting the importance of active participation of university students in academic decision-making, essential to counteract university dropout (Aina et al., 2022).

Through participatory research, not only are students empowered by valuing their contributions to academic inquiry, but theoretical knowledge is also connected with practical insights, thereby contributing to a more nuanced understanding of effective teaching and learning. The implications of this study extend beyond the immediate educational context, supporting a broader application of student-led research in policy development processes to ensure that educational reforms respond to the evolving needs of students and society at large.

This presentation focuses on the role that “sociology of learning inequalities” research plays in French teachers’ initial training. We will first define what the “sociology of learning inequalities” covers. By these terms, we designate a research field developed since the 1990s in educational sciences, aimed at understanding the processes governing the construction of learning inequalities in the daily classroom (Rochex & Crinon, 2011). This research implements a relational approach between pupils’ activity and teaching practices, combining sociological, didactic, psychological and linguistic frameworks. We discuss how these research contributions can enable teachers to understand both their pupils’ learning difficulties and their own professional difficulties.

A double investigation, by interview and documentary, was carried out between 2015 and 2019 (Benveniste, 2023). We collected the speeches of twenty-five primary school teacher trainees in two socially segregated territories, at the end of initial training through interviews relating to their practices, their difficulties and their pupils’ difficulties. Constrained by difficult training conditions, the trainee teachers seem unable to reconcile a number of tensions and conflicts which run through their discourses and cause them distress when they fail to resolve their pupils’ difficulties. To understand these professional difficulties, we then studied the initial training programs for primary school teachers.

We rely on a documentary corpus made up of “Teaching, Education and Training Professions”[1] master’s programs and courses’ titles, descriptions and materials collected in 16 training school ÉSPÉs[2]. Our results show that the social inequalities of learning remain most often marginal in the initial training. More generally, we underline the fact that the pupils’ activity is not at the heart initial training programs. These results can seem paradoxical given the proactive official discourse making teacher training an important part of the fight against socio-educational inequalities. However, we can interpret our results considering the conflicts in French educational policies between social and individual dimensions of school inequalities. We also take into account the strong constraints weighing on master's programs of teacher training and the processes of knowledge recontextualisation (Bernstein, 2007) in teacher training curricula. We will finally underline that teachers are not sufficiently equipped to understand and interpret the learning difficulties of their pupils from working-class backgrounds. Facing unresolved difficulties, these beginners then tend to adopt essentialist readings of pupils' difficulties. Absolving themselves of responsibility for these failures is the only way to stand on the field. This could help understand why teachers are progressively renouncing to make all their pupils succeed and learn during their career (Broccolichi et al., 2018).

In conclusion, we highlight that, far from being a prescriber of "good practices" or a denouncer of unequal "bad practices", the "sociology of learning inequalities" can be used in initial training to change the teachers’ perspective on teaching-learning processes by analysing pupils’ activity regarding teaching practices. Ultimately, it can help regain the ability to act on the learning difficulties of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

[1] Master MEEF (« Métiers de l’enseignement, de l’éducation et de la formation ») in France

[2] École supérieures du professorat et de l’éducation.

Teachers' professional development is a key component for improving and innovating the education system (MIUR, 2015; 2016) and for supporting change concerning knowledge systems, attitudes and beliefs in a democratic way. The latter aspects support teaching action and play a significant role, although in a complex way, on transformation processes and school quality (Altet et al. 2006; Vannini, 2012).

This contribution outlines a tool to support professional development starting from some actions that emerged in the three-year European Erasmus+ project Enabling eXtremely Creative, Inclusive, Inspiring Teachers for Europe (EXCIITE), which focuses on enhancing the competences of primary and secondary school teachers, starting from the analysis of their training needs, in the areas of inclusion, creativity, digital and innovation.

An initial phase of the project involved collecting and analyzing of good training practices carried out in the partner countries, aimed at identifying "Good Practice Elements" (GPE), which characterise various didactic-training actions and which can be considered relatively independent from the socio-cultural context from which they emerged, therefore with a greater possibility of being reproduced. Regarding the area of inclusion, the elements, identified as qualifying in promoting inclusive teaching, are consistent with the definition of "inclusion", intended as the process of removing obstacles to everyone's learning and participation (Booth & Ainscow, 2002).

In particular, the inclusive dimensions emerging from the collected Good Practices and declined at the classroom level concern:

designing and rethinking of educational spaces;

creating supportive environments, in which everyone's uniqueness is welcomed;

building of collaborative relationships in order to create learning communities and communities of practice;

supporting a vision of learning in which everyone feels involved and their point of view is considered and supported;

encouraging student’s agency, valuing each individual's initiative, point of view, awareness and motivation for learning;

rethinking of organisational aspects that promote inclusion;

creating a democratic environment in which the values of inclusion are shared through participation in the educational process.

According to the findings, a self-assessment tool has been designed to stimulate teachers towards reflective action (Schön, 1983) on their pedagogical formats (Pentucci, 2018) in order to support a transformative response (Mezirow, 1991; 2008). Transformative learning is situated in a process that generates new meaning structures, capable of orienting future actions, through the reworking of problematic frames, referring to ways of thinking and beliefs, in a more reflective, inclusive and open to change vision.

The tool will be used to accompany teachers in a training path aimed at improving and developing the quality of inclusion in the classroom context and in inclusive teaching, in a perspective of improvement in which reflection can constitute a constant posture thanks to opportunities that allow teachers to experiment with forms of reasoning aimed at recognising regularities and registering changes (Nigris, 2018).

The tool also offers a stimulus to support and implement research on the quality of inclusive processes at the micro and meso levels (individuals and classroom), beyond the macro level (school system) from an ecological-systemic perspective, consistent with the assumed framework (Index model).

The paper describes a training-research activity undertaken with teachers attending a SEN workshop on communication codes of linguistic education. The illustrated outcomes concern a corpus of more than 400 autobiographical narratives collected over several cycles of education (2020-2024).

The 20-hour course starts by engaging teachers in a reflection on their own life experiences by taking a cue from Canevaro's (1999) fairy tale Il bambino che volava via, from the collection I bambini che si perdono nel bosco. This fairy tale highlights the role that adult expectations play in the construction of a child's identity, often prompting some sacrifice in order to match the required model.

After listening to the fairy tale, teachers, anonymously, are invited to tell an episode from their own lives marked by a similar sacrifice. The collection of contributions is followed by the working groups' characterization of the "excluded parts" according to Propp's scheme of functions, to construct a collective narrative: a group fairy tale - based on the characterization of characters who present difficulties or discomfort, with the idea of giving value to their singularity within the narrative plot – which will be used at the end of the training as a background integrator to plan educational activities.

The main aims of the training activities fall into two areas: the first related to autobiographical narration; the second concerns collective narration and educational planning. The objectives of the first area are to involve future teachers in the recognition of their own needs to arrive at the recognition and acceptance of those of others, as well to use their own story as an orientation tool aimed at promoting reflection, regaining motivation and interests essential for the start of a new professional project.

The objectives of the second area are linked to the idea of ​​building, with the teachers, a quasi- experiment of a curriculum of reading activities by which the fairy tale assumes a mediating role: a background that supports educational-teaching process, promotes the development of communicative interaction between peers, sociability, the recognition of differences as a resource, the improvement of cultures and inclusive practices of the educational context.

This study will illustrate the outcomes of a qualitative analysis conducted on the corpus of autobiographical narratives by NVivo software. Starting from the identification of the key concept (the excluded part of the self) arising from the introductory stimulus, different types of answers have been classified using a top-down approach based on the object and the motivation behind the sacrifice (internal and external). Subsequently, a bottom-up approach was integrated to identify further categories emerging from the in-depth analysis of the contributions.

The results show a significant prevalence of the participants’ causes of sacrifice related to internal and controllable factors on external and uncontrollable ones, such as the choice to adapt to socially recognized models or the prevailing desire to correspond to requests/models coming from the parental context, underlining the considerable influence that the expectations of educators/adults play in the development of the subjects' personality, and in determining their possible projections.

Planning effective teaching strategies to promote everyone’s educational success is at the heart of quality inclusive education and requires a complex set of knowledge and skills, sustained by positive attitudes towards diversity, collaboration and self-reflection (EADSNE, 2012). In this respect, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) represents a crucial framework: based on the idea of learners’ ‘natural’ variability, through its principles and guidelines it encourages teachers to intentionally adopt a set of teaching devices and methodologies to remove any barrier to learning that may be due to differences in students’ knowledge, interests, abilities, learning styles, etc. (CAST, 2018).

In light of previous studies emphasizing the benefits of in-service professional development programs on UDL for the creation of plural and diversity-valuing learning environments enhancing educational opportunties for all (Rusconi & Squillaci, 2023), we initiated a two-year ‘training-and-action’ research project on the topic in a school institute in the Province of Trento (grades 1-8). Within this research approach (Asquini, 2018) teachers’ professional development is embedded in a recursive relationship (a) between theory and practice, through training activities and self-improvement practices, and (b) between research and practice, enhancing innovation on the one hand and, on the other, documenting, informing, and reframing empirical data by connecting it to the theoretical and scientific reflection.

The project was designed as a two-year training and implementation programme (2023/2024 and 2024/2025) involving most of the teachers at the institute (n= 60). The main purpose of the training was to provide teachers with a deep understanding of the UDL framework and the skills needed to design learning units reflecting its key principles. Specifically, the first year was structured in theoretical-oriented collective meetings (3), practice-oriented workshops in smaller groups according to school level (6), and co-design meetings with individual teams (3). Alongside this, the impact of the training, planning and implementation activities on teachers’ skills, attitudes and practices was documented through several phases of data collection with different actors following a convergent mixed method design, including:

1. The administration of a baseline questionnaire, at the beginning of the training programme, collecting information on teachers’ inclusive attitudes and current practices, based on the Teacher Self Efficacy Scale, available in Italian (Biasi et al., 2014) and the Inclusive Teaching Practies Scale (Schwab & Alnahdi, 2020).
2. Self-rating scales (e.g., the UDL Fidelity Tool; Johnson-Harris, 2014) and structured reciprocal observations made by teachers throughout the training sessions monitoring the implemented practices.
3. The re-administration, at the end of the second year, of the initial teachers’ questionnaire, followed by focus groups with the participants, to assess the project impact in terms of attitude and practice change.
4. Administration of a questionnaire to the students involved to collect their experiences and perspectives on the implementation of UDL in their classes.

During the conference, the team will present the documentation regarding the first year of the project, focusing on the results of the first and second data collection phases.