Conference Program

Promoting media education is a pressing educational priority today that involves all stakeholders in the education system. Introducing it as early as preschool helps foster and facilitate dialogue among families, children, teachers, and local authorities, promoting informed, critical, and creative approaches to language, environments, and digital media at various levels.

Let’s explore these levels in greater depth by identifying action plans for promoting media education activities starting in early childhood. Due to space constraints, we will focus primarily on activities to be promoted in preschool:

1) The design and implementation by teachers of educational activities in preschool that promote the use of digital technologies and tools as available resources capable of broadening children’s horizons of knowledge and discovery. These activities are designed and tailored to the needs emerging from the classroom groups, with a view to integrating digital languages and tools in dialogue with the school curriculum, aimed at fostering active approaches, reflective practices, and critical thinking in young children. The goal is to reconceptualize digital tools and screens, transforming them from objects of desire into potential tools of knowledge in dialogue with other cognitive and communicative languages.

2) The organization of regular meetings with families to discuss and exchange views on the management and use of digital technology and screens in home and school settings, with the aim of revitalizing the school-family relationship and promoting media education within families. These meetings also facilitate participatory practices that promote mindful parenting; when cultivated from early childhood, these practices can foster the development of educational communities and virtuous, generative educational ecosystems across all school levels and grades. The meetings can also lead to the creation of documents shared among families—such as recommendations, agreements, or digital school-family contracts—designed to foster shared and participatory educational approaches within classroom groups and educational communities.

3) Periodic quantitative monitoring of digital usage habits within family settings through the administration of questionnaires. Data collection enables families and educational services to reflect on the issue and facilitates the implementation of public policies that involve educational, psycho-pedagogical, and social welfare plans and services, promoting integration with local authorities in each area (municipalities, local health authorities, consortia, social-health districts, and service areas).

The project proposal outlined here is the result of the work and initiatives carried out over the years by CED Centro Educazione Digitale A.P.S., which have made it possible to identify best practices capable of engaging all stakeholders in educational systems by promoting generative dialogic, pedagogical, and democratic processes.