Conference Program

The present contribution suggests heritage education as a field for promoting citizenship practices among children. It highlights its potential to cultivate their awareness as social and cultural actors capable of generating change within their everyday environments, while encouraging their active participation in and engagement to the common good. In its most recent conceptualization, heritage education is understood as a participatory process, oriented toward the co-construction of knowledge about what is recognized as heritage, rather than the mere transmission of information (Del Gobbo et al., 2018; De Nicola & Zuccoli, 2016). Within this framework, heritage is no longer conceived as a set of fixed assets, but as a social and cultural process, continuously transformed and re-signified (Smith, 2006), shaped by the interplay between past, present, and future. Accordingly, heritage is not a self-evident given; rather, it acquires meaning in relation to the futures that are imagined and negotiated (Harrison et al., 2023). Also, international agendas (UNESCO 2003; CoE, 2005) attach central relevance to the role of society in identifying, meaning-making, and care for heritage, sustaining a progressive democratization in this field (Cirino, 2017). However, children’s voices regarding heritage remain significantly under-researched (Ginzarly & Srour, 2021; Smith, 2013), highlighting the need to explore their relationship with it. From a relational and intergenerational perspective (Moran-Ellis, 2021; Eßer et al., 2016), children are understood as competent social actors who actively participate in the co-construction of heritage in dialogue with adults (Sebastiano et al., 2025).

Based on these considerations, this contribution presents an interdisciplinary study that combines educational and design research, with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of how children reflect and co-construct heritage. The methodological framework adopted is Educational Design-Based Research (van den Akker et al., 2006, McKenney & Reeves, 2012), which conceptualizes research objects as epistemic, processual, and unfinished, requiring iterative processes of shared exploration and reflection to co-construct knowledge. This perspective resonates with the understanding of heritage as a collective and socially situated phenomenon, continuously shaped through social practices between subjects as well as between subject and material (Reckwitz, 2003).

The ongoing empirical study, conducted in shape-by diversity area, within non-formal educational settings, involves children aged 8-12 in Real-World Labs (Parodi et al., 2023). These are conceived as creative and dialogic environments, where participants are engaged as active actors. Through material-based stimuli, introduced to render the otherwise abstract concept of heritage more accessible and tangible, children are invited to explore, negotiate, and co-construct their understandings of heritage in relation to shared individual and collective experiences. From this perspective, RWLs are framed as transformative and democratic spaces where heritage becomes a means to reflect on what is recognized as meaningful in the present, identify common goods, imagine possible futures, and experiment with practices of care (Sebastiano, 2025).

By including children’s perspectives within processes of heritage co-construction, this contribution proposes an understanding of heritage education as a democratic, participatory, and future-oriented practice, capable of nurturing situated forms of participation and citizenship in increasingly complex socio-cultural contexts characterized by superdiversity (Vertovec, 2023).