‘Emotions on stage’ (Emoções no Teatro), a support group for minors in psychological distress in the north-eastern region of Brazil, created by two students from the University of Padua, Italy, was the heart of an international Service-Learning experience with a GloCal approach (Bringle & Hatcher, 2011; Brown, 2011; Crabtree, 2008; Khoja-Moolji & Karsan, 2015; UNIBO, 2020, Andrian & Carvalho, 2021; Aramburuzabala & Lázaro, 2020).

This article aims to present this project developed within the Intereurisland exchange and research program (Andrian, 2020), through a bilateral agreement between the University of the State of Bahia - UNEB, Brazil and the University of Padua - UNIPD.

Under the umbrella of the social engagement (extensão) project of the Department of Human Sciences - DCH, Campus III, UNEB: 'The educational and helping relationship in extracurricular contexts', the proposal was developed in a child psychosocial assistance center – CAPSij, in the city of Petrolina, in the State of Pernambuco. The main objective of the support group was to create a safe space in which adolescents could identify, distinguish, understand, share and regulate their emotions. How? through movement and creativity exercises, theatrical propaedeutics, acting, writing, talking. The choice to use art - in this case a form of drama - as a tool of psychological support for adolescents led to positive feedback. It is widely recognized that the use of drama and role-playing can have a function in relieving stress, supporting emotional development and promoting psychological well-being in children and adolescents (Joronen et al., 2008; Larson & Brown, 2007; Keiller et al., 2022).

The article will also describe some of the main characteristics of a possible GloCal approach and the impact of the SL Project on different levels: from the individual to the community one.

Positive feedback from participants from the support group was observed and recorded during conversation sessions at the end of each group meeting. The overall impact of the project was also considered positive by the CAPSij coordination and the UNEB staff. The creation of a therapeutic support group contributed to addressing the need to offer a helping relationship to adolescents, beyond the clinical function of the CAPSij and their diagnosis.

The project also played a formative role in the two students themselves, enabling them to achieve several of the intended educational goals. These included developing skills in planning and conducting group interventions, increasing empathy and communication skills, constantly challenging themselves at a linguistic and interpersonal level. The article also offers a reflection on the criticisms of the project that emerged from the ongoing and final evaluations.

SIS Intercultural Study Abroad (SIS) and Nuova Associazione Culturale Ulisse (NACU) act in synergy to advocate for quality and inclusive education for all students through the pedagogy of service-learning. While SIS is a private organization that offers intercultural service-learning study abroad opportunities to international students, Nuova Associazione Culturale Ulisse (until 2019 Associazione Culturale Ulisse) is a non-profit organization that promotes socially useful activities whose goals are, among others, the promotion of Italian language and culture aimed at equity and social inclusion.

The overarching framework of the pedagogical approach of both organizations is the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) by the Council of Europe, which has guided the educational actions and curricula of SIS and NACU since its first conceptualization.

The most recent project realized in collaboration by the two organizations, “Home 4 the World”, was born in Spring 2022 and soon developed from a service for refugees to a service for Pakistani refugees, given the incredibly big number of Pakistani (Pashtuns for the vast majority) young men who arrived in Siena between June 2022 and December 2023 (approximately 1, 400 people). SIS, NACU and several other organizations have joined their forces to cope with the lack of structures needed to welcome such big numbers. In this context “Home 4 the World” has become a reference point for Italian and English language classes, intercultural education, development of democratic competences and citizenship education, etc. Through intercultural service-learning SIS international students enrolled in the course “Italy, Land of Emigration and Immigration”, Pakistani refugees and asylum seekers, and local volunteers and experts have co-created an inclusive intercultural path for students with different backgrounds and scholastic levels. While international students, local volunteers and experts learn Italian language and culture in a very informal but informative way, some Pakistani refugees who managed to gain a more “advanced” level of Italian over the course of a short period of time became active members of NACU with the goal to assist newcomers and offer a course of literacy for their peers who speak only Pashto and/or cannot write and read. An important goal of this educational path is therefore to help the Pakistani refugees in their process of acculturation, equipping them with the necessary tools to become intercultural mediators between the local community and the Pakistani one and active “citizens” of Italian society. On the other hand, local volunteers and experts and SIS international students have the opportunity to get to know the Pashtun community, learn about the Pashtunwali values and ethical code and imagine together the best ways for refugees’ inclusion into the Sienese/Italian society.

Service-learning (SL) stands as a vital strategy for institutionalizing university community engagement and accomplishing the teaching and learning goals by addressing the identified needs (Compare et al., 2022). This aligns perfectly with the UNESCO Report (2021), which states the need to create a new social contract for education, which challenges all civil society actors to share educational co-responsibility and the adoption of cooperation and solidarity-based methods such as SL (Aramburuzabala and Cerrillo, 2023). This also aligns with the European Commission's (2017) Renewed Agenda for Higher Education, where university community engagement emerges as a pivotal priority. In international collaboration, SL offers several advantages: it fosters intercultural growth by fostering a deeper appreciation for cultural differences; it provides a "GloCal" perspective, allowing an understanding of dynamics at both local and global levels within a multilingual environment (Andrian and Carvalho Teles, 2021). Collaboration among universities facilitates knowledge exchange and best practices, which, in turn, promotes the co-design of innovative SL pathways. This synergy of commitment contributes to a more comprehensive approach to addressing global challenges. This contribution aims to introduce the unique European interuniversity volunteering and Service-Learning program, FLY, coordinated by 8 universities in Europe (5 in Spain, 1 in Portugal, 1 in Italy and 1 in Slovakia) as well as to present early indications of the impact gathered since 2021 and to share good practices identified so far. FLY offers more than 30 different SL projects in 14 countries worldwide each year. The projects cover 3 main areas: “migrants and refugees”, “people at risk of social exclusion”, and “people and community care”. University students are encouraged to participate in FLY to discover the reality and living situations most of the world’s population faces by sharing the same reality with them during their summer break. There is a prior stage, formative and reflective, to provoke critical thinking about global power and inequality dynamics and to question their role in this. FLY is an experiential education process based on reciprocity at personal and institutional levels (students-locals, students-students, university-university, university-social partners, etc.) where the richness of diversity and social justice are core values. It is intended to present this unique program and the results of the analysis of the evaluation and reflection that students complete after their experience, to assess the project, the skills developed, and the programme's effectiveness in general. The contribution will focus on the analysis results covering the benefits of participating in the FLY program for students. Ultimately, the contribution intends to discuss a pathway for working towards a new social contract for education, by applying a network approach to cooperation between formal, non-formal and informal contexts and between different knowledge and expertise.

The contribution starts by asking what contribution the SL offers for the development of the themes proposed by the UNESCO Recommendations for Peace Education (November 2023). peaceful coexistence and conflict management. The UNESCO Recommendations are the product of a long work of reflections, practices, experiences and re-elaborations on peace education that unfortunately still does not find a space of interest and intervention within our school and higher education contexts.

Referring to the SL approach, we want to highlight what the synergies can be between higher education, peace education, sustainability and service learning.

The UNESCO Recommendations consider it a priority to combine the theme of peaceful coexistence with international understanding, co-operation, peace and education relating to human rights and fundamental freedoms. Inside the document you read that peace not only requires the absence of war or armed conflicts but also requires an inclusive, democratic and participatory process in which human security, respect for State sovereignty and territorial integrity, dialogue and solidarity are encouraged- The internal and international conflicts are resolved through mutual understanding and cooperation, sustainable development in all its dimensions is achieved, universal access to lifelong and life-wide education, including in emergency and conflict situations is provided, poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty is eradicated, all human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons without exception are upheld and active global citizenship is promoted. SL is therefore an optimal tool for the development of curricular of higher education, where the component of education for sustainability and building peaceful coexistence is fully integrated with the disciplinary knowledge of the proposed curricula.

Sustainability, conceived as a concept that goes far beyond that of sustainable development, must be able to answer questions that can guide SL actions: What should we continue to do? What should we stop doing? What should be creatively reinvented?

The role of higher education can therefore be decisive and impactful for a change in the culture of knowledge that is not limited to hierarchising and separating the disciplines towards a strongly sectorial and non-osmotic preparation, but becomes transdisciplinary, capable of taking knowledge beyond its boundaries.

It is increasingly necessary to step outside one's own disciplinary perspective to be able to look at problems from different perspectives in order to understand their complexity and the human nature from which they arise. Keeping focus on the potential for change and sustainability of our planet are in the choices of humans and not machines/AI.

SL is rooted on this principle, on this conviction and on this realisation if we consider that the objectives of SL include: change, well-being, improvement of the starting situation.

It is established in literature that Service-Learning (SL) in the places where it originated and developed, North and South America, has Dewey's activism and Freire's social pedagogy as pedagogical references (Selmo, 2014; Bornatici, 2020; Fiorin 2020). Since this educational approach began to spread in Italy, supporting the multiple attempts to eradicate the transmissive school in favour of a different conception of education and didactics, a reflection on the pedagogical experiences that have cleared the ground on which SL is producing encouraging results in the field of didactic innovation has begun. The figure recognised as the main national reference is undoubtedly that of Don Milani (Fiorin, 2016, 2020, Mortari 2017). As pointed out by some SL experts (Vigilante, 2014; Fiorin 2017, 2020), also the Sicilian experience of Danilo Dolci can be considered a reference for SL, not only for the collaboration with Paulo Freire but for the real and lived attempt to connect knowledge to civic commitment. This contribution intends to offer a reflection on the points of contact between Danilo Dolci's thought and the SL in its application methods and in its mission, to make the School a protagonist of social change. Talking about Dolci, Vigilante underlines how he was: "A firm critic of the traditional school, which he accuses of being functional to domination with its frontal lessons, desks, and transmission of knowledge, Dolci attempted to create in Mirto, near Partinico, an experimental educational centre based on the maieutic method" (2014, pp. 187-188). The method of reciprocal maieutics, in which everyone in a circle, as equals, discusses, reflects, puts themselves in "communion" (Dolci 1988, p.124) and deals with a theme/problem, in which there is no maieutic but a conductor, a "facilitator", to the SL learners, immediately makes one recall the phases of "motivation" and "diagnosis" typical of this approach (Tapia, 2006, Rossa, 2016). The idea of knowledge as a tool for social engagement, in which the knowledge learnt is put at the service of the community to make it a place for the exercise of democracy, is made tangible by Dolci with the experience of the birth of the Mirto Study Centre as described in the book "Chissà se i pesci piangono" (1973), in which all those who today we call the "stakeholders" offer their personal contribution and where the students, in the seminars dedicated to them, learn to use knowledge in a new way, connected to reality. Dolci states: 'The problem is serious. How do you overcome the lecture? The lecture represents the typical structure of the old school world" (2020, p.25) This is one of the questions also posed by the SL in its desire to innovate the School. Dolci's educational thought intersects with the theme of combating school drop-out as a tool for social revenge. In schools today, civic education becomes the place where the power of democracy can be exercised. Who knows what Dolci would think today of the spread of the SL, of the introduction of civic education as a curricular subject in schools.