Conference Program

International and national frameworks increasingly conceptualize schools as democratic learning ecosystems capable of integrating educational, social, and territorial resources (OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2021). Within this vision, schools are called to act as community-embedded learning environments that support students' development throughout their educational pathway. In Italy, the Linee guida per l'orientamento (MIM, 2022) recognise orientation as a continuous educational process of self-construction, beginning in early childhood, aimed at fostering self-awareness, confidence, and recognition of individual interests and potential across all levels of education.

This paper explores how Education Outside the Classroom (EOtC) (Lauterbach, Bølling & Dettweiler, 2023), informed by Early Career Education perspectives (Del Gobbo, Frison & Galeotti, 2021) can function as a pedagogical leverage for lifelong orientation, enabling exploratory encounters with the world of work and supporting students’ reflection on possible futures. In this framework, early career education is viewed as a series of educational activities that, while connected to the school curriculum, extend beyond the classroom through territory-based exploration. This broadens students' understanding of opportunities, interests, and personal aspirations, supporting self-exploration and identity development rather than prescribing vocational choices.

The study was conducted in a rural comprehensive institute located in a mountain area of Northern Italy, involving selected classes from kindergarten, primary, and lower secondary school (N = 87 students). The research adopted a participatory action-research design and all classes participated in a locally-rooted orientation project, combining community exploration with classroom-based reflective activities. This was designed to foster a vertically coherent approach across educational levels. The local territory — civic institutions, local enterprises, and cultural heritage sites — functioned as an extended classroom (Frabboni, 1980), offering students authentic encounters with work-related practices and local professions. Within this broader framework, a ricerca-formazione pathway (Asquini, 2018) was carried out with primary school teachers, resulting in the co-design and implementation of a four-day immersive EOtC experience involving two primary school classes, During this process, research questions and educational objectives were collaboratively defined with the teaching team.

Data collection combined qualitative and quantitative tools including teachers' and students' logbooks, field notes, interviews and pre- and post-experience questionnaires with both participating and control classes (Trinchero, 2002). Logbooks supported the iterative redesign of activities and formative evaluation. Reflective sessions facilitated by the researcher explicitly linked EOtC experiences to themes of self-awareness, interest exploration, and future orientation in a lifelong perspective.

Preliminary findings suggest that structured EOtC experiences foster meaningful contact with professional practices and stimulate students' reflection on their personal interests, competencies and aspirations. At the institutional level, the ricerca-formazione process enhanced teachers' professional reflexivity regarding their orienting role and contributed to envisioning a shared vertical orientation curriculum. This paper argues that territory-based educational experiences can function as a pedagogical infrastructure for lifelong orientation in rural contexts in particular, positioning schools as relational hubs that connect learning, community resources, and students’ exploration of possible futures.