Over the past decade, the exponential growth in the production and dissemination of technological media has resulted in a significant change in their use, transitioning from serving merely as a medium for all levels of educational activities to functioning as immersive virtual environments (Rivoltella, 2019; De Simone & Annarumma, 2018). However, caution is warranted in assuming a direct and automatic link between the introduction of technological tools and educational innovation. True innovation requires not only the incorporation of new tools but also a meticulous evaluation of appropriateness for specific targets, their suitability for the intended educational purposes and their integration into new and appropriate projects and training paths.

Against the backdrop of this complex phase of technological and digital shift, this contribution presents the latest outcomes of a multi-year university teaching experimentation based on the methodological framework of flipped learning (Bevilacqua, 2018) and flipped classroom (Bergman & Sams, 2012), with a focus on the mastery learning pioneered by Benjamin Bloom (1973). Embracing the epistemological paradigm of the Community of Inquiry (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2001), our research adopts a mixed-method approach to obtain, from the students participating in the experimentation in the past year, a comprehensive feedback about their learning experience.

Building on prior investigations (Coco, Pillera & Strongoli, 2022; Pillera & Strongoli, 2022), the quantitative results of the Community of Inquiry (COI) Instrument (Arbaugh et al., 2018) – divided into the three dimensions of teacher presence, social presence, and cognitive presence – are scrutinized alongside responses to three open-ended questions. These questions, administered simultaneously to the COI Instrument to the same sample of students, were designed to be linked to the three aforementioned dimensions of the COI, prompting students to represent, in a metaphorical form, how they had perceived the teacher’s role, the relationships with peers, and the learning process within the flipped classroom experience.

To enhance the richness of our analysis, we employ a coding process inspired by previous studies on educational metaphors (Strongoli, 2017). This approach, refined over the past year, aims to extract nuanced insights from the complex metaphorical images created by students. By intertwining qualitative and quantitative data, our study seeks a holistic understanding of students’ perspectives on university teaching innovation through the flipped learning model. This integration contributes to a more comprehensive exploration of the educational landscape, shedding light on the intricate interplay between technological advancements, teaching methodologies, and student experiences.

In the last decade, the foreign literature on University reformism has increasingly exploited the communicative impact of metaphors expressing a significant cognitive perspective, provided that university systems as a whole may be interpreted as complex and self-referential environment. The analysis of some metaphors used by academic scholars have the power to simplify the complexity of reformist processes going on in worldwide university systems may help us better understand the programmatic path that universities are supporting to cope with the challenges of transparency, efficiency, accountability.

The purpose of this proposal is to analyze the relationship between communication, rhetoric and research in the field of university reformism imposing the effort of simplification and understanding not only for academic actors, but even for students and stakeholders. In this view, the critic reflection on some recent books, The New University (2021) by James Coe and The Good University by Raewyn Connell (2019), investigate the convergence of academic discourse and reformist innovation through the cognitive efficiency of metaphors simplifying the understanding of academic innovation through the symbolic and semantic reduction of an ever-changing scenario. Their books have the merit to delve into the contingent and programmatic factors fueling academic reliability in terms of democratization and inclusion through teaching activities.

More specifically, James Coe and Raewyn Connell’s works exalt the attempt to build a critic academic discourse through the rhetoric and communication lens of reformism, even with the purpose to develop an academic meta-discourse in reference to technological and dynamic evolution of communicative process within and beyond university environments. This is what David Wllets points out in A University Education (2019), whose challenging book exploits some educational metaphors in communicative way, thus confirming the cognitive force of metaphoric solutions explaining the academic pathway to excellence and renovation.

Platformization, democratization, merit, quality teaching and networking are only some of the keywords inspiring the academic debate on the future of high education in our hyperconnected societies, in which old and new functional risks sometimes overlap to undermine the credibility university authority.

The “liminal” doctoral experience (Savva and Nygaard, 2021) sees doctoral students in education with “one foot in world of practice and one in academia” (Zambo et al., 2015, 234); sensations of intellectual confusion and frustration (Trafford and Lesham, 2009) see the need to integrate one's past experience by redefining one's professional voice and characterize oneself by the themes of becoming and belonging (Savva and Nygaard, 2021).

Defining the skills of doing research in the education doctorate and how to develop them is, in the Italian context, a little explored and recent topic (Milani, 2014; Lisimberti), which led to a first analysis of the literature in the sector (Lampugnani, 2023 ).

As part of the PhD course in "Education in Contemporary Society" aimed at doctoral students of the Department of Human Sciences for R-Massa Training - University of Milan Bicocca, the need arises to question ourselves about the training process and the skills developed in what looks not only at academic performance but at aspects of professional construction and personal gain.

The research question we ask is: How is developing the construction of professional and academic identity develop in the doctoral student's lived experience?

The research participants are 35 doctoral students from cycles 39-38-37, recruited with a purposive sample.

The research methodology adopted refers to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2009), in a phenomenological-grounded interpretative process (Mortari, 2009).

Firstly, 19 Italian doctoral students from 38-37 cycle were offered semi-structured interviews (Lampugnani, 2023) which, following an initial analysis, saw an individual and then collective "restitution" and co-interpretation of the results.

In a second phase, the preliminary results allowed the construction of written questionnaires with open questions, proposed to all 35 doctoral students, starting from the start of the new doctoral cycle (39), also in this case going to be co-interpretated.

Main findings are analysed.

The 3 main emerging themes with sub-themes:

-emotional level (need to listen and discuss; anxiety (from performance); difficulty in organisation; difficulty in structuring the peer group even on "concrete" aspects; expectations)

-moments of the training path, role and meanings: (inaugural conference of the ESC doctoral school as an institutive and ritual moment; the meetings with the PhD Coordination; the "change of year" days relating to the state of the art of research with the faculty of the College and other doctoral students are described as interesting (Lampugnani, 2023).

-Metaphors of the research process

The research methodology allows us to dwelve deeper into the difficulties encountered also with respect to the “unsaid” and the latencies ("I waited to make an appointment with my tutor [...] then I realized it was late").

The research process, in particular the moment of the interview, was experienced by the doctoral students as a useful non-judgmental listening space, which appears to have a "diagnostic" value of the efforts and processes, as well as accompanying the development of the training process.

The research seems to be able to constitute a perspective of analysis and reflection for teachers, supervisors and coordinators, to understand situated experiences and processes.