Conference Program

The aim of this ongoing research is to explore dialogical spaces for peace education —both formal and non-formal— within all the institutional reception and integration centers for unaccompanied children with migratory backgrounds in a medium-sized city in Northern Italy with a long history of migration flows, which intensified in 2023 and slowed down over the past two years. Bringing social systems theory (Lumhann, 1990, 2002), critical pedagogy (Freire, 2014; Pirozzi & Rossi-Doria, 2011) and educational peace studies (Kester, 2008; Herrero Rico, 2018; Gürsel-Bilgin, 2020; Wyness, 2013) into a productive dialogue, I investigate how educational interactional communication systems are produced in the daily lives of unaccompanied children, stressing systems’ potential for change and expansion through horizontal dialogical activities.

I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with child educators, Italian teachers, linguistic and cultural mediators, and individuals holding political and administrative roles, as well as 12 co-designed dialogical activities between three different groups of eigth childrens and young adults (one group for each housing center). In these interactions, I used facilitation (Baraldi & Farini, 2013; Kovalainen & Kumpulainen, 2007) as a tool to empower children’s peacful agency, enhance their epistemic authority, and build community across social differences.

To create a dialogic interaction as horizontal as possible, I avoided proposing structured laboraties, games, or predifined activity, entering each space without imposing rules or normative expectations about a “right way” to partecipate (and, by contrast, a “wrong” or “deviant” one). As facilitation suggests, rules that could determine clear turn-of-talk, or demand attention to the partecipant’s story, were co-constructed in the dialogic system by the partecipants from themselves and peacfully enforced by them only when they feelt it necessary. When conflict of opinion arose, facilitation helped me to mediate them —not manage, nor resolve them—, exploring differences and supporting the co-construction of shared narrations.

Drawing from a non-essentialist view of culture, I searched for hybrid cultural-trajectories (Holliday, 2022; Baraldi, 2024) and immaginary of untested feasibility (Freire, 2014) co­constructed by the partecipants as they narrated their past, their present lives and the hopes they have for the future. The final encounter in each group focused on supporting them in developing proposals to improving their lives within the community, facilitating their agency in a peace-building effort that conceptualizes everyday peace as dialogically co-created, contextual, sustanible, responsibility-oriented and conflict-transformative.

The interviews were analyzed through narrative and thematic software-assisted analysis. The analysis of the video-recorded activities was also supported by conversational analysis (CA) techniques. CA allowed me to carefully observe how facilitation could (or sometimes failed to) enhance turn-taking processes and children’s epistemic authority (Baraldi 2022), fostering more responsible, free, and fluid communication in which mainstream metanarratives can be subverted and deconstructed, and small cultures and possible communities are co-constructed (Amadasi & Holliday, 2018; Tramma, 2019).

Finally, once everything will be analized, this research intends to share its result with the community of educators, producing guide-lines that could help them to create stable dialogic spaces in their housing centers, as a parallel and integrative educational tool of peace-building.