The debate to affirm justice in educational spaces in Europe focuses on a democratic education based on some key dimensions: the appreciation of differences, an attitude of openness, a set of skills related to the emotional sphere and a critical knowledge and understanding of oneself and the world. (Council of Europe, 2018)

When we consider the urgency of building this kind of education, it becomes clear how important it is to start at an early age.

Research has shown that ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) is crucial both for the development of the person and for the early detection of difficulties. (Motiejunaite, 2021, Starting Strong VI, 2021). Goal 4 of the 2030 Agenda aims to ensure that all children, youth and adults, especially the most marginalized and vulnerable, have access to education and training that is relevant to their needs and the context in which they live. However, according to the latest OECD data on the participation of children with special educational needs or at risk of social exclusion, only a quarter of these children (27%) are included in early childhood education and care (Council of Europe Recommendation, 2022).

The Italian context is suitable for carrying out a large-scale study because of the recent establishment of the integrated system of educational services for children from 0 to 6 years of age, which aims to fill the gap of a public offer that was previously very diversified in its administrative management, sanctioning the State's responsibility for the whole segment.

A comprehensive review of the main documents and laws governing early childhood education from 0 to 6 years of age has recently shown that there has been a paradigm shift, going beyond the notion of removing barriers and addressing injustices faced by children in difficulty, towards a holistic understanding of the child, emphasising the harmonisation of physical, social and cognitive aspects (Macchia & Torri, 2023).

The Pensare IN grande project focuses on Italian services for children aged 0-6 years and aims to implement their quality to help professionals support every child, including those with disabilities and special educational needs. Methodologically, a mixed-methods interpretive research paradigm has been adopted.

This paper summarizes the preliminary findings from the main questionnaire, based on the self-reflection tool for kindergarten teachers developed by the European Agency (IECE Environment Self-Reflection Tool, 2017). It aims to identify existing good practices and highlight critical issues that still need to be addressed from a bottom-up perspective. The analysis will be carried out both through content analysis of the open-ended responses and through translation of the responses into numerical data.

It is expected that the results will highlight geographical differences within the country, possible tensions between education and health institutions, deficits in the training of educators and teachers (at an early stage also for scientific research), but also the reporting of good practices, even in the most difficult situations and in unexpected geographical areas. The data collected will provide food for thought and guidelines for standardising educational practices.

The porpose is underline the importance of the network school to promote the service lerning among the scools and the institutions and the associations. The network tool, which has been normalized thanks to the school autonomy introduced into Italian legislation as early as the late 1990s, is effective in implementing, disseminating and embedding best practices in schools. If it is then about best practices in service learning, the "school network" tool takes on a double significance. The network of purpose among schools that share the same vision in spreading the methodological dimension of service learning. And the network as a democratic process within the school itself, as a practice itself of service learning. and as an experience of active citizenship. The network therefore as a tool for co-designing actions in which students operate in osmosis with the local area. Network as a tool to foster comparison and sharing of experiences among students in the school network itself. Network as a lever of change through the structuring of training paths aimed at the promotion of "expert" teachers, functional to the rooting of service learning in school, professional and territorial communities. Network as a space for sharing design matrices and evaluation rubrics in order to make actions in service learning scalable with a view to continuous improvement. There are not many experiences of school networks that have made service learning the focal point of their curriculum. The experiences in Italy of school networks that have to their credit the "mission" of making service learning a reflective opportunity for curriculum reshaping are interesting because they have reset as a community and with democratic approach the methodology in educational institutions. The curriculum has taken on a transdisciplinary dimension and students' key citizenship competencies have improved, thanks primarily to action on the identity process within different communities, both school and territorial. This made it possible, by empowering female students and improving well-being at school, to recover on school dropout. If we add to this the confrontation within the network, making the dimension of service learning a strong piece of a territorial educational offer, thanks to the definition of an instrument "network organizational conference" that has a non-episodic but permanent structure, the effectiveness is strengthened.

The objective of this presentation is to address the need for increased capacity of higher education teachers and students to manage an effective shift towards inclusive learning environments through creation of e-service-learning (e-SL) experiences that integrate community services into the academic curriculum.

e-SL is a course-based, credit-bearing educational experience in which students participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs, and they reflect on the service activity to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the academic discipline, and enhanced sense of civic responsibility. In e-SL the educational experience is mediated by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) wherein the instructional component, the service component or both are conducted online, often in a hybrid model

The meta-analysis of various strategies of integration of meaningful community service into academic curriculum discovered that e-SL can be useful in reducing educational inequality, especially if it involves students in community activities with the aim of transforming them into promoters of social empowerment (Modić Stanke & Mikelić Preradović, 2023).

We will present e-SL pedagogical approach based on experiential learning (Salam et al., 2019) through experiences developed in the higher education institutions in Europe in the eSL4EU project. Additionally, two open e-courses that were both developed as part of the project SLIDE will be demonstrated: (1) Digital Empowerment: Training program for higher education teachers, trainers and educational leaders and (2) Digital development: Training program for higher education students.

The academic teachers will gain insight into knowledge and skills needed for successful and inclusive use of emerging technologies in teaching, but also into barriers and negative effects of technologies on inclusion and diversity. We will provide them with inspirations on how to become inclusive learning experience designers, recognize the importance and benefits of diversity and inclusion practices in their teaching, how to use extended reality to support broader equity and inclusion efforts in online learning environments and distinguish between entertainment games and games for good that focus specifically on creating social change.

Also, higher education students will learn about the possibilities to fully participate in digital education, how to sensitize themselves towards digital inclusion of underprivileged and underrepresented community members and become empowered to address sensitive contemporary societal issues and at developing their digital competences. They will be informed about four main digital pillars: digital competence (confident and appropriate use of digital technologies to engage in society), digital fluency (appropriate use of technologies and application of digital skills to enhance one’s own learning, work-readiness or everyday life), digital intelligence (a set of social, emotional and cognitive abilities that enable individuals to face the challenges and adapt to the demands of digital life) and digital engagement (appropriate use of digital tools to find, listen to and mobilize a community around an issue).

This study explores the implementation of Opera as a key element within a Service Learning program. This innovative methodology aims to engage students in community service activities while enriching their educational experience and their musical culture.

Since 2010, the Degree Course in Primary Education Sciences of University of Palermo has implemented SL to enhance lifelong, meaningful, and responsible learning in students, in order to increase a deep awareness of themselves, their community, and their education.

Solidarity, collaboration, and active participation are just some of the dimensions that this activity will promote. SL represents the intersection between theory and practice, between research and and experimentation, betweenculture, values, and life, between learning individual skills and active citizenship skills.

In this contribution, in continuity with other activities, we present the design of a SL activity offered to first-year students during the second semester for the a.y. 2023/24.

In collaboration with local institutions, a program that integrates Opera with SL projects in at-risk neighborhoods was developed.

The project is being carried out in collaboration with the Musical Association “Europa InCanto” (EIC), involved for years in listening education and Opera training activities.

Among the objectives there is the possibility:

- To spread our immense cultural heritage in the socio-culturally disadvantaged neighborhoods of Palermo.

- To represent some parts of an Opera, with community members and our students as absolute protagonists

- To take care of all aspects necessary for the staging of an Opera (scenery, music, costumes).

- To know how to use available/recyclable materials.

- To organize events or workshops in schools, involving singers or experts in the field.

- To use online, interactive resources, such as videos, which could make the opera more accessible to young people.

- To involve the community through interactive workshops, screenings of performances, or even small street performances, collaborating with local organizations, creating partnerships with schools and associations.

University students, future teachers, who participated were trained on how to integrate Opera into curriculum and how to design relevant SL projects.

For this purpose, in addition to preparatory meetings specifically on SL, some activities aimed at listening to and understanding Opera were planned.

To evaluate the SL activity, we adopted an approach that considered various aspects, including the impact on the community, the development of student’skills, and the learning process.

The program demonstrated a positive impact on several levels. Students developed social skills, empathy, and a sense of responsibility, while gaining a new understanding of Opera.

The integration of Opera into SL has proven to be an effective strategy for engaging students in meaningful activities, while promoting culture and artistic education. This multidisciplinary approach has the potential to be adapted into broader educational contexts, thereby contributing to the training of conscious and culturally enriched citizens.

The promotion of universities as hubs for fostering citizenship presents a nuanced challenge, balancing the core mission of developing competencies and human capital with the imperative to nurture democratic citizenship attitudes, dispositions, and functionalities. The Service Learning Approach emerges as a promising response to this challenge, offering an innovative, philosophically grounded, and socially responsible teaching methodology that resonates with universities' commitment to integrating social responsibility into their mission.

This paper delves into the institutionalization process of Service Learning at the University of Palermo, focusing on the development of an evaluative framework and the implementation of a Service Learning initiative within the Master's Degree in Pedagogical Sciences. Service Learning, characterized by its deliberate integration of theory and practice, empowers future pedagogists to engage in transformative service that meets community needs while fostering deeper reflection on classroom experiences and cultivating a robust sense of civic engagement essential for democratic societies.

Against this background, Service Learning embodies a “pedagogical formula” that develops generative connections between the world of university education and societal needs, blending innovative teaching methodologies with a profound understanding of the university's social responsibility. Specifically for the Master's Degree in Pedagogical Sciences, this approach - stemming from the valorization of the pedagogical culture of inclusion and the values that underpin it in terms of participation, belonging, democracy, equity, solidarity, and plurality - offers a unique opportunity to position the university at the forefront of pedagogical services and policies aimed at advancing social progress. By engaging both faculty and students in a dynamic teaching and learning process that challenges conventional academic knowledge, Service Learning emerges as a vital tool for promoting inclusive processes and fostering active citizenship in our increasingly diverse and complex societies.

The research focused on Service-Learning (SL) in the context of Indire's "Avanguardie Educative” Movement investigated and analysed educational experiences on the national territory (Orlandini et al., 2020) in a "service research" perspective to facilitate decision-making processes in educational practice (Mortari, 2017) and promote educational and organisational innovation (Orlandini & Lotti, 2023). In the school years from 2020/21 to 2022/23 in collaboration with a group of educators, the Indire research team supported a co-design process of SL pathways in some schools in the Empoli area and explored the impact on the perceptions of students, teachers and educators during the design and implementation of SL activities. The qualitative instruments used for the description of the relationship between teachers and educators were developed from the interprofessional dimensions of the PINCOM-Q framework (Ødegård, 2006; Hynek et al., 2020), from "la forme scolaire" (Maulini & Perrenoud 2005) and from the identity elements of the SL (Furco, 1996; Tapia, 2006; Lotti & Orlandini, 2022).

In this contribution, the first results concerning interprofessionalism between teachers and educators involved in the project are returned. In particular, this work presents the analysis of the instruments submitted in three moments of the SL paths - initial: group training padlet; ongoing: diamond SL; final: SWOT on interprofessionalism - from the results of which it emerges how formal education can benefit from the collaboration with professional figures expert in non-formal education in terms of consolidation of professional skills, motivation and climate in the educating community, but also needs a shared will for didactic and organisational innovation.