Conference Program

This paper investigates the constitutive role of art in early childhood and childhood education, a role that extends beyond a purely instrumental or recreational dimension. The hypothesis is that artistic experience, as a cognitive and transformative practice, acts as a catalyst for reorganizing educational practices towards a model of circular knowledge, where traditional pedagogical dichotomies dissolve into an ecological and relational paradigm (MIM, 2021). Within this framework, each creative act by the child is reconceived as a unified act of expression and reflection (MIM, 2012). It is not merely a matter of producing an artifact, but of understanding artistic doing as discovery, play, and a cognitive process mediated through a medium (painting, clay, movement, sound, digital), in a process where sensory experience, manipulation, and symbolic elaboration are inseparable (Munari, 1977). The resulting learning is dynamic and integrated, following not a linear but a reticular and regenerative model, co-constructed in the dialogue between the child's action, the shaping of thought, and subsequent critical re-elaboration, both individually and in groups. This approach enables an understanding of the mechanisms and evolution of the hundred communicative and expressive languages (Malaguzzi, 1996) through any mediator, including digital ones, in relation to the characteristics of the developmental stage. Adopting a media-educational perspective, this proposal contributes to the educational project in which the school assumes the responsibility of accompanying children's growth through the implementation and progressive conceptualization of their experience of reality, and the empirical knowledge of the possibilities offered by different technologies. The heuristic experience becomes a multisensory encounter with reality, where the prepared environment, understood as a “third educator”, and the relationship with the adult mediator are central. The encounter with art is facilitated by narrative strategies, as demonstrated by the operational examples on artists (Haring, Mirò) conducted in a nursery. The article also integrates a media education perspective, promoting the creative and integrated use of digital technology to enhance expressive languages and document processes. One technique that fosters the development of multiple languages (verbal, visual, sound, and digital) is digital storytelling, which naturally lends itself, even in the preschool context, to an initial form of awareness regarding the creative use of digital media from the perspective of media literacy education (Zini et al., 2018; Ranieri, 2018; Cappello & Ranieri, 2026). From this perspective, media education adopts a logic of integration, aimed at ensuring that digital languages are mastered more effectively by both adults and children (Rivoltella, 2017). Educational services can initiate a dialogue that fosters mutual enrichment and contributes to providing increasingly meaningful experiences for children, starting from the 0-6 age group (Tisseron, 2013; Di Bari & Mariani, 2018; Cappello & Ranieri, 2026). Teaching through art takes the form of an epistemological paradigm, the aim of which is to educate children in “thinking creativity” and aesthetic sensitivity from the outset. Educational mediation emerges as an intentional practice that protects children from premature datafication and profiling while nurturing their agency, exploratory attitudes, and symbolic capacities within increasingly complex digital ecosystems (Cappello & Ranieri, 2025)