Youth leadership has been promoted as both a fundamental right and an opportunity for personal and organisational development: this means that children have the right to be heard and taken seriously in matters affecting them (United Nations, 1989).

From a European point of view, the EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027 wants primarily to enable young people to be architects of their own lives, support their personal development and growth to autonomy, build their resilience and equip them with life skills to cope with a changing world. This main objective involves providing young people with the necessary resources to become active citizens in their communities, have a concrete impact on policy decisions across all sectors and, last but not least, contribute to fighting youth poverty and promoting social inclusion of young people. Accordingly, with these disruptive challenges, the YOULEADERS action research project was born in the framework of the Erasmus+ Programme to promote the active citizenship of young people and their sense of initiative, starting from a community-based study (Lewin, 1946; Stenhouse, 1975; Argyris et al. 1985; Hopkins, 2002) on young people leadership needs (Chow et al. 2017; Hornyak et al. 2022; Mortensen et al. 2014).

The project used the action research methodology to acquire knowledge, co-design a hybrid Leadership Learning Program, and pilot and adapt it to a different national context according to a situational leadership approach (Ayman, 2004).

Along with co-designing a training path to develop individual competencies as young leaders) one of the main goals of the educational program was to create a collective impact from schools to the territory through creating and implementing project works created by and for the community. To this aim, a part of the co-building program has been devoted to realising project works aiming to generate a positive impact at a local level. Based on a previous desk analysis, the action research involved 3 South-Western European countries - Italy, Spain, and Portugal - and is aimed at 30 students per country aged between 14 and 19 (secondary school level) who live in rural or peripheral areas with fewer opportunities.

The community, made of younger, local institutions and other stakeholders, such as educators, political representatives and civil society organisations, has been involved through focus groups and co-design sessions to identify, validate, and adapt the main learning outcomes for the community building program.

The focus groups investigated cultural values, essential skills, knowledge and abilities for young leaders and learning outcomes. The main results of the young students and stakeholders focus group sessions were analysed and discussed with the community involved using a comparative perspective and according to the action research self-reflective circle (Carr, 2006; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). The co-building programme is actually in its pilot phase, and it is providing the selected beneficiaries with the tools to improve their entrepreneurial skills, face the challenges at the educational and labour market level, and enhance their skills to be leaders of social initiatives starting from their communities of reference.

The re-introduction of civic education (Law 92/2019) in Italy gained new impetus to this curricular area and poses new challenges to schools for its delivery. These challenges are mostly related to the implementation of civic and citizenship education (CCE) as a cross-curricular subject, to the adoption of a competence-based approach and to the delivery of extra-curricular activities. The need for a competence-based, transversal curriculum for CCE, aimed at enhancing students’ citizenship competence, urges school to re-think their organisation and instruction, in order to provide meaningful opportunities to learn and practice citizenship. In this view, the whole-school approach (WSA) to CCE considerably contributes in developing and practicing citizenship competence because it integrates the democratic values and principles into 1) teaching and learning, 2) school governance and in the overall atmosphere of the school; 3) in the local community, taking advantage of the many opportunities offered by the school experience as a whole for civic and citizenship education, beyond the curriculum (Council of Europe, 2018a;2018b).

In relation to this premise, this contribution present the first findings of the PRIN project “The school as a democratic learning environment: promoting a whole-school approach to civic and citizenship education in the first cycle of instruction”, created in collaboration between the University of Rome LUMSA, the University of Bologna and the University of Verona. The project aims at fostering civic and citizenship education and democratic learning environments through the adoption of a whole-school approach in the first cycle of instruction and includes two specific objectives: 1) Conducting an in-depth analysis about the dimensions of the whole-school approach in six first cycle schools through multiperspective case studies; 2) Providing the six schools with continuing professional development (CPD) using the Ricerca-Formazione (R-F) approach in order to implement the WSA for CCE in all the aspects of school life.

The contribution will present the initial findings of the multiperspective case studies (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2003) that will be carried out in schools in Spring 2024. In addition to this, it will delve into the instruments development process (student and teacher questionnaires, focus groups and interviews protocols), highlighting the challenges in measuring the multidimensionality of CCE at the school level.

Educational literature emphasises the efficacy of the whole-school approach (European Commission, 2015), in fostering the establishment of educational communities within which students live. This approach fosters active citizenship empowerment and democratic values and principles in young people, preventing and tackling the spread of NEETs (not in education employment or training) (Bevilacqua et al., 2024).
Bell'impresa! (https://percorsiconibambini.it/bellimpresa/) is a multi-year project (2020-2024) funded by "Con I Bambini" Foundation in the Northwest area of the Province of Verona. It involves 13 municipalities, 10 Comprehensive Institutes, 5 non-profit organisations, and 1 for-profit organisation. The project aims to prevent school dropout by fostering entrepreneurship and promoting personal responsibility, initiative, and creativity among children aged 8 to 13. The project entails the creation of a student cooperative during both curricular and extra-curricular hours, with the perspective of simulating a business environment. These cooperatives encourage teamwork among students, who share tasks and assume responsibilities towards their peers, the school, and the community under the guidance of educators and through the activation of the local community. A total of 3142 students and 425 teachers took part in the project. 25 student cooperatives, 48 cooperative workshops, 61 skills workshops, 72 events for students and population and 74 information meetings with companies and experts were created.
The objective of this presentation is to introduce the outcomes of the first evaluation phase of the Bell'Impresa! project, realised according to Kirkpatrick's four-level model (2009). The study – aimed at understanding the perceptions of project participants (students, teachers, educators, school principals, and local authorities) and the students learning achievement in terms of knowledge, attitudes, and competencies – can be contextualised within the constructivist paradigm (Lincoln & Guba, 2016). For data collection, exploratory focus groups (Hevner et al., 2010) were held with 62 primary school students, 52 secondary school students, 7 teachers, 7 school educators, 8 cooperative educators, and 5 local authorities. Data, analysed through an inductive content analysis (Elo & Kingäs, 2008), stressed how student cooperatives and workshops have been considered learning environments established within schools to acquire knowledge and attitudes further. Through the school's openness to the community, facilitated by educators, it became possible to support students in acquiring and developing competencies. Activities adopted a student-centred capability approach: students learned by doing, exercising significant agency and experiencing democratic principles. Experiential learning was accompanied by reflective activities that prompted students to reflect on themselves, the world, and their place and role within it. Through this project, they were able to develop communicative-relational, organisational-managerial, problem-solving, decision-making, and entrepreneurial skills. The project's impacts encompass not only improvements in learning outcomes and career guidance but also the student's presence within their communities through civic services and events, the development of partnerships with local services, and the integration of school cooperatives into the agendas of local administrations.
The results overall highlight how, through cooperatives, students created products and services as a concrete response to a real need of community members, thus becoming active and responsible agents of their own and others' futures through service-oriented action.

Within the research-intervention project, MUSA Spoke 6 Action 3.1.3 "Contrast and prevention of school dropout in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods" were activated 20 PCTO pathways, entitled "Social Cohesion and Urban Sustainability", that involved students from six different high schools. The research question investigates how participation in a community service-learning activity (Gallop, Guthrie & Asante, 2023), carried out within the ETS network "after-schools" of the San Siro district in Milan, supports the development of key competencies for lifelong-learning (European Council, 2018), particularly multilingual, personal and social skills and the ability to learning to learn, from an agency-based citizenship education perspective (McLaughlin, 1992). The research framework refers to the urban anthropology model of Learning cities (Biagioli et al., 2022) to promote in a multicultural and multiproblematic suburban context, social cohesion and enhancement of the differences (Benhabib, 2006). The path has been monitored in itinere through co-assessment of the learning goals, by several observational tools used by the students (Guba & Lincoln, 1989). The contribution presents an initial exploratory analysis of the experience of eight students involved in the after-school program activated in Dolci school (IC Cadorna) and illustrates a thematic reflexive analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) of their diaries, the descriptive self-assessments written at the end and of a focus group in which they were invited to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the project from the point of view of their agency (Manyukhina & Wyse, 2019, Pastori 2022) and to reflect on the process of developing the expected citizenship skills (Santerini, 2010, Zecca, 2018). The results of the data analysis show how all the students became aware of their initial representations and sometimes prejudices regarding a socio-cultural context very distant from their own experience. A diachronic reading of students' diaries reveals an ongoing assumption of awareness of their role in supporting learning processes of the children they helped with individualised educational tutoring and development of their ability to identify the difficulties students encountered, e.g. 'memorising', dealing with textbooks’ vocabulary, that was often incomprehensible to children, in particular those with a migrant background, and maintaining concentration on exercises that were not meaningful to them (Sorzio, 2020). This last aspect points to the theme of the cultural nature of the school curriculum (Sorzio, 2022) and how the link with one's past and present experience enables the attribution of meaning necessary for learning (De Vecchi & Carmona Magnaldi, 1999). Another fundamental aspect that came out is the potential of the multicultural context, of the encounter and recognition of 'the other', and how this affected the development of new skills. On the other hand, also emerged difficulties in dealing with some “problematic” children and the acknowledgment of the need for support from the professionalism of educators and teachers. Also concerning the theme of the relationship with all the actors involved in the context - teachers, educators, researchers - they report how it has fostered the development of their ability - defined by some of them as 'problem-solving' - to implement more active and inclusive teaching methods.

Since 2021, the Research Center on Media, Innovation and Technology Education (Cremit) of the Catholic University has proposed using the new construct of "digital educational poverty" (Pasta, Marangi, Rivoltella, 2021) to update and broaden the concept of "digital divide". The phenomenon is therefore not only understood as the deprivation of devices and access to the Internet, but also refers to the failure to acquire digital skills, understood as new alphabets (Rivoltella, 2020) necessary in the postmedia society to analyze the production and use of different digital content by the "viewers" of the social Web (Pasta, 2021). In this perspective, the ability to design, create and disseminate media content and formats is central.

This strategy is the basis of the Digital Connections project (2021-2024), created by Save the Children together with the Cremit and Edi Onlus. The project, which involved 99 schools, over 6,000 students and 400 teachers, developed the fight against digital educational poverty in the civic education curriculum of the second and third year of lower secondary school, through the activation of 7 participatory newsrooms in the classrooms: two for digital writing, to create entries for Wikipedia and online petitions; two for the production of podcasts, to create a report and a review; two for the construction of digital storytelling, both video and visual and one for the development of social marketing strategies, aimed at disseminating online content to promote digital wisdom among peers.

In the first part of the contribution, the theoretical and methodological framework will be provided that has oriented the design and production of digital formats according to the logic of cultural convergence (Jenkins, 2006), digital plenitude (Bolter, 2020), multimodal semantics (Kress, 2010) and Peer&Media Education (Ottolini, Rivoltella, 2014; Rivoltella, 2021), in a logic of cross-media protagonism (Marangi, 2021).

In the second part of the contribution, the data referring to a selected sample of 100 products created in the classes will be presented, analyzed with the PRODACT (PROmote Digital Analysis and Competences in Transmedia) tool, created by the authors to evaluate the products according to different parameters.

The artefacts were analyzed using the indicators of the aesthetic, critical and ethical dimensions of digital competence, typical of New Literacy (Rivoltella, 2020) together with the references of DigComp 2.2 and the four areas of Digital Educational Poverty, in an integrated perspective which takes as background the concept of "Onlife Citizenship" (Pasta, Rivoltella, 2022)

The analysis shows that this type of productive practices not only implement digital skills in students, but also develop teaching and educational practices that combine formal and informal skills and facilitate participation and protagonism, even in complex or problematic socio-cultural contexts, according to the logic of third-party learning (Potter, McDougall, 2017) and in a perspective of digital citizenship that allows us to develop updated and expendable educational media skills (Buckingham, 2020) and to develop the ethical sense necessary to consciously inhabit the mediapolis (Silverstone, 2006).

Student autonomy and their democratic practices and experiences of participating in school decision-making are the result of the revolution of April 1974, the conquest of freedom and the start of a democratic government in Portugal, and since then, they have been recurrently referenced in political discourses in Portugal and highlighted in national and international studies in the field of school administration and management. The revolutionary process made students visible (Sousa & Ferreira, in press), and today we can highlight the concern to listen to students and learn about their practices of participation and influence in school environments in the exercise of credible and solidary autonomy (Ferreira, 2004, 2007, 2012; Correia, 2021), where they make informed and shared decisions (Melville, et al, 2018) and which more or less influence the dynamics of the school. There could be a management of consent (Apple & Beane, 1995) or a democratic management of public schools (Lima, 1988, 1998, 2014, 2018). In fact, in Portugal, the democratic participation of students in school governance has been provided since the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic (1976) through participation in collegial school management bodies, which, despite the advances and setbacks it has undergone in its implementation, persists to this day in the representation of students, with the right to vote, in the General Council (Decree-Law no. 75/2008), heard regularly in the Pedagogical Council and through the Students' Association.

Based on this framework, a research project is being carried out, which seeks to identify and understand experiences of autonomy and democratic practices in schools through the voice of secondary school students, where students recognize and are recognized as having opportunities to participate, take initiative and influence decision-making in school management. The current study is being carried out in Portugal, adopting a mixed methodology, where the qualitative study is carried out in several schools through participant observation at student meetings and associations, focus groups with students and semi-structured interviews with school principals and teachers involved in the projects and initiatives. As far as the quantitative study is concerned, it is being developed through a questionnaire survey of all secondary school students, with the aim of finding out, from a national perspective, about student autonomy, identifying their democratic practices and experiences, initiative and participation in school decision-making and management.

From the research already carried out and the data collected, we can see that students distinguish between different systemic levels of participation: (1) at school, through student assemblies and student associations; (2) in municipalities, participating in Municipal Youth Assemblies and municipal councils; and (3) nationally, with different proposals from the Ministry of Education (Sousa & Ferreira, in press). In this communication, we will attempt to report on the partial results of the quantitative study - of the responses to the online questionnaire survey of students attending secondary school in Portugal (school year 2023-2024) - as an exploratory cross-section of the data collected, including different practices and experiences of student participation and autonomy in schools.