Conference Program

Drawing on the findings of the research project “La Valutazione d’impatto sociale della didattica digitale dopo il Covid-19” (Lo Presti & Dentale, 2025), this contribution examines the different teaching styles - that emerged across the educational contexts investigated - and explores how such pedagogical configurations may be associated with differentiated trajectories in the development of students’ cognitive, relational, and socio-emotional competences. The analysis is grounded in a comparative examination of data collected across the various educational contexts involved in the study, which enabled the identification of recurring and differentiated didactic arrangements. Focusing on teaching styles makes it possible to reconstruct how the methodological component of didactic innovation took shape in hybrid and uneven forms, bringing transmissive, integrated, and dialogical approaches into tension, with differentiated implications for students’ opportunities for engagement and activation (Lo Presti et al., 2025).

The study is framed within a lifelong learning perspective (Field, 2006), understood as attention to competence development processes along educational pathways and to learning trajectories that unfold across heterogeneous educational contexts (Lo Presti, 2017). Within this framework, the experience of distance learning is treated as a transversal context that cuts across different levels of the educational system, making it possible to observe the emergence, renegotiation, and differentiation of multiple didactic practices (Faggiano & Fasanella, 2022; Fasanella et al., 2020). Adopting a situated perspective, the study analyses the ways in which life skills (Faggiano et al., 2024; OECD, 2015) and forms of democratic agency (Biesta, 2010) manifest themselves in relation to pedagogical styles, assessment practices, and relational settings, highlighting how such configurations translate into differentiated processes of competence activation and enactment.
From this perspective, didactic innovation is not conceived as mere technological modernisation, but as the reconfiguration of pedagogical practices, assessment processes, and relational settings which, within differentiated institutional and cultural contexts, define the conditions of possibility for the activation and enactment of cognitive, relational, and socio-emotional competences. In this sense, it may foster the development of life skills and contribute to creating the conditions for the exercise of democratic agency (Biesta, 2010).