Conference Program
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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B.02. Participatory and Challenge-Based Learning for Educational Innovation, Active Citizenship and Democratic Transformation (1/2) Location: Aule di Botanica (CU028): Aula Blu3 Convenor(s): Chiara Bassetti (University of Trento, Italy); Marta Villa (University of Trento, Italy) | |
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GEOCIVIS – Geography and Socially Acute Questions for Democratic Citizenship in Primary Education 1: University of Genoa, Italy; 2: SUPSI, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland; 3: University of Florence, Italy; 4: University of Florence, Italy In increasingly complex and uncertain societies, primary geography education often remains focused on static knowledge, neglecting controversial and future-oriented issues. This limits opportunities for young learners to develop democratic agency and critical awareness of spatial inequalities. In this context, GEOCIVIS Project addresses the challenge of translating geography’s disciplinary potential into meaningful engagement with Socially Acute Questions (SAQs) (Catling, 2013; Wilks, 2010; Simonneaux & Legardez, 2010; Floro, 2011; Lupatini, 2021) in primary education, seeking to move beyond descriptive approaches towards relational and inquiry-oriented conceptions of geographical thinking, so as to frame social, environmental and political processes as spatially interconnected and open to critical investigation. In contemporary societies, primary curricula often acknowledge democratic citizenship as a goal yet provide limited guidance on how SAQs can be approached through disciplinary geographical inquiry. As a result, SAQs are often treated merely as topics, weakening geography’s analytical contribution to civic learning. Building on scholarship in geography education and citizenship education, GEOCIVIS explores how SAQs - such as migration, spatial justice, and socio-environmental conflicts - can be introduced as geographical problems and meaningfully integrated into teacher education and primary classrooms in Switzerland and Italy. The project combines literature review, policy analysis, and classroom-based case studies to investigate how curricular expectations around democratic citizenship are enacted in practice, and how inquiry-oriented pedagogies are supported or constrained by institutional and professional conditions. On this basis, it develops multilingual guidelines, scaffolding strategies and practical teaching tools. By fostering argumentation, cognitive decentering, and negotiation of diverse perspectives, GEOCIVIS aims to support teachers in framing geography education as a driver of democratic agency and sustainability from the earliest stages of schooling. | |