Conference Program

In contemporary societies, based on a culture of convergence, promoting democratic values—belonging, care for the common good, active citizenship—requires pedagogical approaches capable of engaging with and embracing digital languages without reducing the educational experience to passive consumption of content. The challenge lies in transforming technologies into tools for authentic participation from the earliest ages.

The theoretical framework of this paper centers on cultural heritage (CH) education in its tangible and intangible dimensions, viewing CH as a privileged reservoir of experiences, meanings, and collective memories from which to draw in order to develop cognitive, social, and civic competencies. From this perspective, CH is not conceived as a closed disciplinary content, but as a democratic and communal space in which learners engage in practices of citizenship: they recognize their cultural belonging, develop critical awareness of the places they inhabit, and assume responsibility for the commons.

This vision is rooted in the values of the Faro Convention and the National Plan for Cultural Heritage Education, which recognizes cultural heritage as playing a fundamental role in promoting peace, inclusion, and social integration, as well as providing an authentic and motivating context within which learning acquires meaning and becomes grounded in lived reality. It is also hoped for a critical and informed use of the channels and forms of expression offered by digital technologies as a vehicle for the broad inclusion of diverse social and cultural components through processes of identity construction, citizenship education, and the promotion of intercultural dialogue, in line with the design of civic education (Law 92/2019) and the Guidelines for the cross-curricular teaching of civic education (Ministerial Decree 183/2024).

The paper illustrates an action-research experience conducted as part of the UNESCO Project for the Knowledge and Dissemination of the Universal Value of the Historic Center of Naples, developed in collaboration between the Observatory on Governance for Education in Cultural, Artistic, and Landscape Heritage (OGEP3 Unina) of the University of Naples Federico II, the Municipality of the City of Naples, three local comprehensive schools, and the innovative startup GRETA s.r.l.

The program and workshop activities, focused on the key competencies of the 2018 EU Recommendation—digital, civic, and cultural awareness—placed the children in the role of creators: producers of multimodal cultural content and active builders of shared meanings within their own territory. The project developed a transmedia ecosystem of interactive cognitive artifacts based on XR technologies, structured into three complementary educational tools and integrated into the bilingual kit *Discovering the Historic Center of Naples, a UNESCO Site*. Through openness to the active participation of the public, communities, and schools, a willingness to listen, engage in dialogue, and highlight diverse perspectives, cultural sites have become spaces for the re-appropriation and reinterpretation of individual and collective identities. The emerging model, founded on collaborative public-private governance, interdisciplinarity, and experiential grounding, offers concrete guidelines for designing inclusive educational environments where democratic values are built through doing, narrating, and sharing with the support of digital technology.