Conference Program

The reorganization of teaching practices during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the systematic introduction of digital teaching, broke new ground in novel ways of conceiving educational pathways and, above all, interpreting competence acquisition. Within this context, digital teaching can be conceived as a laboratory for methodological innovation (Faggiano et al., 2024; Fasanella et al., 2025) that made visible, and in some cases, contributed to fostering more autonomous and reflective forms of learning management among students.

Building on insights from the research project La Valutazione d’impatto sociale della didattica digitale dopo il Covid-19 (Lo Presti & Dentale, 2025), this contribution adopts the students’ perspective to examine the experiential dimension of the perceived development of life skills across its cognitive, relational and socio-emotional domains. The perceptions of such development are interpreted through the lens of self-directed learning processes (Knowles, 1975; Candy, 1991; Garrison, 1997; Bruni & Isidori, 2019), through which students engage in orienting, monitoring and critically reflecting upon their educational experience, taking an active role in regulating their goals and strategies.

The integrated analysis of the self-assessment rubrics and transcripts of focus groups that involved them enabled an a posteriori reconstruction of the dynamics through which participants attributed meaning and narrated their own development. From this perspective, skills development is understood as a meaning-making process that takes shape in students’ lived experiences and reflections. Framed within a lifelong learning perspective, understood as transformative and biographical continuity (Jarvis, 2006; Candy, 1991), this development is configured as a situated dynamic that places students at the center of their own educational trajectory.

Following Biesta (2006), who conceives education as a space for activating agency, self-directed learning can be understood as one of the ways through which this agency manifests itself in the formative experience. The ability to consciously steer one’s learning pathway, make autonomous decisions and critically reflect on one's own learning trajectory represents an essential condition for the reflective and responsible exercise of democratic agency (Biesta, 2006). Life skills thus emerge not merely as simple functional acquisitions, but as outcomes of reflective and self-directed processes through which students gradually recognize themselves as co-constructors of their own knowledge pathways.