Conference Program

This contribution, situated within the framework of ongoing doctoral research, proposes an ecosystemic model of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) oriented toward the transformation of school practices and the construction of enabling environments. The objective is to overcome the conceptual ambiguities that characterize the international debate (Oxley & Morris, 2013; UNESCO, 2015) and to offer a theoretical-operational framework capable of guiding schools and teachers in the design of authentic, sustainable, and institutionally rooted participatory experiences. Indeed, in the absence of a solid epistemological foundation, civic education risks being reduced to a formal device or an isolated disciplinary content, devoid of any effective transformative impact.

The proposed model integrates four theoretical traditions rarely brought into dialogue: Dewey’s educational pragmatism, Makiguchi’s value-creating pedagogy, Nussbaum’s Capability Approach, and Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. This convergence allows for the reconfiguration of citizenship not as a static set of competences, but as a continuous formative experience built through practices of participation, reflection, and shared responsibility. The aim is to outline a theoretical framework capable of configuring GCE as a “pedagogy of the gaze” oriented toward the deconstruction of egocentric and nationalistic perspectives, re-configuring it as a process of human development, democratic participation, and social value creation (Bertolini, 1988).

The model is organized according to a logic of progressive scalability, which allows educational institutions to implement GCE as a multi-level process. On a didactic level, this translates into participatory activities such as micro-deliberations, service learning, local area investigations, and practices of intercultural cooperation. On a reflective level, it introduces devices such as civic portfolios, narrative rubrics, and learning diaries, which support processes of critical awareness and personal agency. On an institutional level, the model is rooted in the Whole School Approach (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004), promoting a systemic transformation that involves curriculum, governance, educational relationships, and collaboration with the community. From an evaluative standpoint, the model adopts the twenty descriptors of the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (Council of Europe, 2018) as an interpretative structure to orient assessment toward a formative and process-oriented dimension. This allows for the monitoring of not only outcomes but, above all, the developmental processes of values, attitudes, and competences linked to democratic citizenship. Each level represents an expansion of the school's capacity to configure itself as a democratic ecosystem, in which agency, participation, and reflexivity are sustained by coherent didactic practices, evaluative tools, and organizational structures.

The emerging implications highlight how dialogic and participatory approaches can reconfigure the school as a lived democratic space, where the agency of students is supported by reflective, collaborative teaching practices open to the world. In this perspective, the role of teachers assumes a crucial significance: through a professionalism oriented toward research, the care of relationships, and shared design, they become co-constructors of enabling contexts. This vision aligns with the perspective of “porous didactics” (Tarozzi & Moser, 2025), which interprets the school as an open, dynamic institution interconnected with global challenges.