The recent funding from the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) represents an opportunity to renovate and modernize school buildings in response to educational, organizational and environmental sustainability needs. Although innovative national and international resources and guidelines are available, the design and construction of school buildings refer to the normative legislation (Ministerial Decree 1975). The dialogue between the normative level and research in pedagogy is functional in the design of school buildings, conceived as dynamic environments that adapt to needs that emerge even in the post-occupancy phase. The field of research connecting pedagogy and architecture recognizes the learning environment as a third educator according to a holistic view where different school environments are interconnected, to considering the school building as a unique and integrated learning environment.

These reflections are related to the FUTURA design competition "The School for Tomorrow's Italy," which in 2022 opened new scenarios to address the renewal of Italy's school heritage with the design of 210 new buildings. The competition represents an opportunity to design the schools of tomorrow and opens the possibility for a widespread renewal of school buildings, integrating functional, spatial and technological features toward solutions for integrated environments and for self-sufficiency and circularity of the life cycles of its processes. Designing new schools is an action that supports a specific vision of schools for the coming decades.

At the national level, in 2013 the document “New Guidelines for School Building” published by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, highlighted the possibility of directing the design of school buildings towards a model that goes beyond the old layout with classrooms and corridors, toward a system of complementary and synergistic spaces. A design act that, pursuing the major dynamics of the regulatory system (from the European to the local scale), increasingly incorporates a qualitative-performance dimension, moving toward a specific and localized physical design based on the environment.

Thus, the relationship between design requirements, determined by the norm, and orientations coming from pedagogical research mark a field of reflection to re-orient the normative frame of reference toward design possibilities aimed at holding together the indications coming from different areas to raise the levels of well-being and comfort of school environments and give prominence to the design act that responds to a social demand and is expressed through actions and fulfillments that develop in a society in which the user represents the reference point of the normative process.

Through the analysis of some projects submitted to the FUTURA competition the contribution aims to explore how and whether the design guidelines of the competition have influenced the design action, with what technological and environmental innovations, analyzing the conducted experiments and highlighting their principles and contradictions.

INTRODUCTION

The Dante-Carducci school is in Piacenza (North-Italy) in two different buildings in a residential neighborhood. The population is characterized by good housing stability, the socio-economic physiognomy is heterogeneous: families with a high standard of living and cultural level, situations of medium well-being and growing cases of marginality linked to evolving immigration situations with reflection in the classes’ formation and with different outcomes for the Italian language. Furthermore, the school-family dialogue has revealed some critical issues also due to pressing economic urgencies. The buildings are very different: Dante has all the classrooms occupied while the Carducci has fewer classrooms but large corridors, a large gym and a garden surrounding the school. The Carducci’s teachers have for several years developed research for methodological solutions aimed at responding to the many students with SEN and NAI (NewlyArrivedItaly).

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

New challenges have led new responses: in the Carducci school the choice to design "new learning environments" with gradual structural as well as methodological and didactic changes has led to a reflection between teachers and students to guarantee the "Vision of the Institute": person’s centrality, developing an ethic of responsibility and building a sense of legality and democracy. Wellbeing, inclusion, and learning are three fundamental aspects for the academic and educational success of all students, without exception.

The research is aimed at understanding students' vision (Grion, Cook-Sather, 2013; Quaglia, Corso, 2014) about their school and giving them the opportunity to explain their vision of the school.

In the Carducci school, the learning spaces were reorganized with the assignment of classrooms to teachers (Armenakis, et al., 1993; Biondi, Borri, Tosi, 2016; Marcarini, 2016) to improve aspects related to learning (Barrett et al. 2015; Bannister, 2017; Baker, 2019). For the Dante school, the decision to involve students in research is useful for understanding the vision that students currently have and their expectations and desires.

METHODOLOGY

The research is qualitative-quantitative (Mertens, 2014; Trinchero, 2015. Questionnaires divided into four parts were administered to the students:

- 1^st: my vision of school;

- 2^nd: school well-being;

- 3^rd: I and school, studying and learning

- 4^th: disciplinary/subject/thematic classrooms.

The questionnaires give to the schools are identical in the first three parts, the fourth part changes because disiplinary/subject/thematic classrooms have been introduced in the Carducci school while in the Dante school the organization is traditional.

After giving the questionnaires, a focus group was held to return the results to the student representatives, two from each class, to accept suggestions or identify critical points both with respect to the new organization of the Carducci school and as regards the traditional organization of the Dante school.

RESEARCH RESULTS

Regards Carducci school, the research was conducted to understand how the students experienced this change, what they think about it and what the positive and critical aspects are. Regards Dante school is important to understand the students’ vision, the positive aspects the critical issues and how they would like their school and how it could be reorganized and/or redesigned (Woolner, 2015; Weyland, 2015).

This exploratory research has as a starting point the international debate, developed at the end of the last century, on the necessity of bringing innovation into the educational system from a perspective of lifelong-learning and to favour the acquisition of 21st Century competences. Recommendations call for schools intended as Civic-centers, open to the local communities and able to recognise extra-school learning, and with innovative learning spaces designed for learner-centred didactics.
Thirty years on from the Salamanca Declaration we ask if these innovations guarantee inclusion and educational achievement for all.
This research is articulated through the presentation of four case studies: two innovative high schools in Italy, and two in Finland. Through an ecological-systemic approach it aims to understand, by collecting the perceptions of the students, teachers, and Head teachers, if these school models also favour the inclusion and well-being of all the students. Based on the analysis of the results it appears that, according the the perceptions of the research participants, a model of school open to the local communities and able to recognise non formal learning seems to favour the inclusion of all students. It also emerges that the use of innovative learning spaces can foster the use of learner-centred didactics that can facilitate the participation, the motivation, and the involvement of students with special needs.
However these elements do not guarantee higher inclusion, innovative aspects notwithstanding there nevertheless remain certain critical issues, that impede the achievement of full inclusion for all.
Even though it is not possible to generalize the results, both positive and negative, this research can have an exploratory meaning and value, the outputs could shed a light on some particular aspects of school inclusion, stimulate some critical considerations about the state of the art of inclusion in the selected schools, and inspire further research.

Cultural Framework

The research contribution falls within the realm of reflection internationally identified as Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE), defined as the «examination of the effectiveness for human users of occupied designed environments» (Zimring and Reizenstein, 1980, p. 429).

Extensive international literature reports on the positive effects that Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) have on both student learning and engagement and teaching practices (Imms, Kvan, 2021).

Most Italian school buildings were constructed before the 1970s and often were not originally designed as schools (Fondazione Agnelli, 2020). Most students learn in small spaces with limited structural flexibility.

INDIRE, the Italian National Institute for Educational Research, is working on a three-year research study together with the University of Melbourne and Cowan University in Perth to explore the role of the school furniture in changing teachers' practices and students' engagement.

As for the students, the following research questions guided the research:

RQ1: Are levels of student engagement perception in learning correlated with the types of furniture present in their classrooms?

RQ2: Does the time dedicated to student-centred pedagogies change in the presence of innovative furnishings?

Method

The research used a quasi-experimental method with a repeated measures approach to isolate school furniture and understand how it impacts on student engagement and teachers' mindsets. It is a single subject research (Fraenkel, Wallen, 2006) where participants serve as both the control and treatment group following an A-B-A design where A is the baseline (the traditional setting), B the situation changed (the innovative setting), and A is the returning to a nontreatment condition (the traditional setting).

The research employed research tools already validated in the context of primary schools in Australia: (1) Student Survey, (2) Photo Elicitation, (3) Classrooms observations through a digital tool called LEASA which measures the time dedicated to four dimensions (Focus mode, Pedagogies, Learning Activities, Learning Communities); (4) The Teacher Mindframes questionnaire; (5) the Teacher interview.

Two classes from the fourth and fifth grades of an Italian primary school were involved as an instrumental case study.

Throughout the year, repeated tri-weekly measurements were taken to assess: (1) students' perceptions of their cognitive and behavioural engagement, (2) actions of the teachers in these classrooms (3) Photographs taken by students of the furniture they preferred, with annotations explaining their preferences; (4) the shift in the teachers’ mindset due to furniture change.

Outcomes

In this contribution, we focus on the outcomes as for students, and we found that:

• Students believed that their learning had improved due to innovative furniture;

• While measurements of student engagement levels did not change significantly in the presence of innovative furniture, students perceived that furniture had an impact on their learning;

• Students reported they tend to spend more time in readings and decreased levels of anxiety and stress in the presence of innovative furniture since concentration and focussing was scaffolded thanks to the new furniture.

The use of internationally validated research tools permits the results obtained in the Italian context to be compared internationally.

Transformative processes are embedded in educational contexts (Scurati, 1997): human potential is cultivated and this endeavour currently presents itself as highly complex and dynamic.

With this contribution, we intend to present some methodological reflections around a path of accompaniment to the " school development" (Schratz & Steiner Löffler, 1999) that deals with defining the plots of possible transformations related to questions of ethics, values, and the common good of the school. Staging the educational event, in fact, fundamentally consists of a work of understanding and therefore of creating the conditions so that the triangulation between teacher, pupil and knowledge gives space to the context, to the vast world that contains all the experiential, cognitive, relational knowledge.

Starting from a research path initiated in 2012 at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano on the relationship between pedagogy and architecture in the design process of school buildings (Weyland, Attia, 2015; Weyland et al, 2019; Weyland, 2021; Weyland & Falanga, 2022), now interpreted by the interdisciplinary workshop EDEN, Educational Environments with Nature, between 2016 and 2018, an advisory support activity for schools was born, which combined the need to qualify the physical spaces of the school with the need to update teaching practices and develop school organisation with the aim of improving pupils' and teachers' sense of well-being (Hughes et al. 2019).

From these experiences, the idea of conveying through the university proposals to accompany the development of the school and its spaces through research-training paths has arisen (Asquini 2018). The object concerns the process of designing together pedagogical-didactic and architectural environments in which to stage the educational relationship, involving professionals from education, educational research, architecture and design, and local administration. Between 2019 and 2024, more than 30 school and educational communities throughout Italy have entered into research-training agreements with the university, focusing increasingly on the need to create spaces and teaching methods that are more just, that is, more consistent with current challenges and capable of imagining the school as a place of well-being and where cultural development can be presided over.

The presentation will focus on what Luigina Mortari (2007) calls the 'posture of the researcher' in her daily practice. The effort that is being put in place is in fact to process the data collected by the various collaborations on the three moments that Elisabetta Nigris (2018) describes as central: co-situating the research, that is, identifying a common objective that is relevant to all those involved; identifying the design, which must be agreed upon, according to the expertise of each, both by the teachers, who provide the data, and by the researchers, who assume responsibility for the research methodologies and tools; discussing and co-constructing the analysis and synthesis of the data, in order to establish the effectiveness of the change actions undertaken.

The paper describes the research activity carried out by Indire’s Space and Pedagogy research team to investigate the relationship between traditional/innovative space on teachers’ practices and students’ motivation. The research activities have been built around the Australian Vasse Study which was run in the school years 2019 and 2020. The guiding issues dealt with the following research question:

To what extent does furniture challenge teachers by changing their mind set? and what effect does furniture have on students’ engagement?

The intention is to gather good data on the extent to which furniture types (1) impact teaching and (2) student engagement/well-being.

The research questions being addressed concerned relationships between learning space design and deep learning holding of the teacher mind frames:

• Are innovative learning spaces associated with higher levels of deep learning among students?
• Does the holding of teacher mind frames vary across traditional and innovative learning spaces?

Existing student engagement instruments are generally pitched for mid-late adolescent students; they also do not offer provision to consider the role of the learning environment on student engagement (Morris, Imms, 2020).

The research protocol is based on an iterative and explorative research design since no suitable tool for measuring these variables exists at present. A co-design activity has been used in a preliminary phase of the research activity where teachers as researchers using “The Archipelago of possibilities” tool reflected on their intrinsic motivation for change and designed a new setting with flexible furniture in a collaborative workshop.

The project was conducted using a repeated measures design (quasi-experimental) carried out in 2022. Two primary classes were involved in three terms duration. Three-weekly repeated measures were taken across the three terms of (1) student cognitive and behavioural engagement (6-10 items, three times a term), (2) teacher actions in these classrooms (LEASA digital application), and (3) photoelicitation using post-it to comment students’ favourite piece of furniture. Once-a term measures included (4) teachers completing a Teacher Mindframes survey, and (5) teachers participating in a structured interview drawing on the outcomes form the LEASA statistics, that they could comment on with the researchers (once a term for each term). The aim of the first term was to collect baseline data in standard furniture setting, that of the second term in flexible furniture while during the third term the involved classrooms stepped back to standard furniture. To collect data the five Vasse Study observation tools have been localised. In each participating school͕/class teachers of the class were required to complete the Teacher Mindframes (TMF) survey͘. This is a 34-item survey that gauges the degree to which teachers hold eight of the mind frames identified by Hattie & Zierer (2018) as more likely to lead to positive impact on student learning.

At the end of the three terms total of 500 responses received͘. In total 30 students and 4. teachers took part in the study across the school. The next steps will be to compare the outcomes of the Australian and Italian context evidence.

This contribution aims to open a dialogue about the educational and social possibilities, as well as the limits, of a wall-less schooling project called Strade Maestre (literally, Master Roads). Its educational space is a long-journey (ie, nine months, roughly one thousand kilometers), where walking is the main mode within travel roughly equally divided between travel and residency days.

In particular, we want to address three themes inspired by the call:

• Appropriation: will the dynamic succession of places of the itinerant school allow some grade of appropriation?

• Flexibility: which flexibility is allowed in an itinerant school?

• Inclusion: how to promote inclusion in such unorthodox learning environments?

Since 2021, the Strade Maestre project has undergone thorough planning and refinements, paving the way for its inaugural launch during the 2024-2025 school year. In the first scholastic year, a cohort of 15 students (11th or 12th grade) from diverse school backgrounds will be led by educators who serve as teachers, excursion guides, and mentors.

Appropriation has been described as the process through which space becomes place (Rioux et al., 2017). In this perspective physical changes of the environment are considered opportunities for symbolic transformation. The educational project Strade Maestre, in absence of the possibilities of physical change of the environment, fosters appropriation setting out tools that allow the learning communities to change school rituals and praxis. This arrangement could promote equality fostering symbolic acts of appropriation or could fail neglecting the materiality of this process. Documentation and analysis of this peculiar configuration could shed light on the dynamic of appropriation and on its relative cultural value.

The experience of succession of places could be described as the succession of different experiences of appropriation, analysis of this process could promote a new perspective on appropriation that frames this process as a strategy aimed to promote appropriation competence, as a key competence to promote social justice.

Strade Maestre moves the focus of flexibility from the evaluation of the degree of freedom of a space to the design of a viable path for the learning communities contributing to the overlap between flexibility and inclusion. In travel schooling there’s little space for incidental flexibility. The latter could be primarily reached through the sharing of the group's needs and a careful and skilled planning of the paths and resources to be set up in the places of residency. In that case documentation and analysis of these processes could be useful to point out best practices to nurture flexibility, rethinking the relevance of school resources in favour of the relevance of the group and of the territory.

Strade Maestre seeks inclusion through the construction of groups of students with significantly different biographies and trough a strict program of observation of trained educators, supervised collective analysis of the social construction of processes of inclusion and exclusion (Rapp and Corral-Granados, 2021) and design of ad-hoc interventions informed also by the restorative justice tradition.

Research-based documentation of Strade Maestre is warranted to better understand how to innovate learning environments as social justice devices.