Conference Program

This paper presents a mixed-method case study (Creswell, 2014) examining a decentralised model for organising the school-based tutor role in the fifth year of the Master’s Degree in Primary Education at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The study analyses the relational and organisational dimensions of the practicum implemented in the Autonomous Province of Trento. It is situated within an ongoing phase of organisational and value-oriented transformation of the programme and seeks to contribute to the debate on possible directions for reorganising the curricular practicum and redefining university–school relations, particularly in light of proposals oriented towards centralisation and procedural streamlining justified in terms of efficiency and rationalisation.

The analysis focuses on the school-based tutor as a pedagogical mentor accompanying student teachers during the practicum, in structured dialogue with university coordinators. The tutor is interpreted as a co-responsible actor in processes of observation, planning, assessment, and professional reflection, performing a mediating function between academic knowledge and situated school practice.

The research design integrates longitudinal quantitative data covering four academic years (2022/23–2025/26) with qualitative data derived from participant observation during initial and debriefing meetings between school-based tutors and university coordinators, experimentally introduced from the 2024/25 academic year onwards.

Across the four-year period, 124 school-based tutors and 122 student teachers were involved, distributed across 45 Comprehensive Institutes, corresponding to approximately 85% of the provincial network. The findings highlight marked turnover in the role. The system is characterised by broad participation and limited reiteration of the same teachers over time, generating a widespread territorial distribution of practicum activities. This configuration reflects structural organisational and territorial heterogeneity, within which the decentralised model supports context-sensitive arrangements and differentiated learning pathways, aligned both with local educational needs and with students’ expressed requests. In a context characterised by high tutor rotation and voluntary engagement without structured financial recognition, sustainability appears to depend on a model grounded in distributed participation and context-sensitive coordination between university coordinators and individual schools.

Qualitative analysis highlights processes of professional dialogue and shared meaning-making around the tutor role, interpretable as the emergence of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998), grounded in mutual engagement and reflexivity. The meetings function not merely as coordination devices but as spaces of professional recognition and collective reflection. Their dialogical dimension fosters forms of situated responsibility and shared orientation that are difficult to generate through centralised assignment procedures. The school-based tutor role thus emerges as a form of educational professionalism shaped by situated autonomy, shared responsibility, and dialogical practice, operating in tension with centralising and managerial governance logics.

If democracy is understood not only as a formal institutional principle but as an enacted practice of participation and shared responsibility (Biesta, 2011), the case suggests that future reorganisation of the practicum should strengthen these dialogical spaces rather than introduce additional formalised designation procedures, while preserving attention to local contexts. The study concludes by discussing possible ways of sustaining educational professionalism as a democratic practice within a context marked by increasing managerialisation and hybrid governance arrangements.