Conference Program

This autoethnographic paper explores the annual negotiations surrounding compulsory assessments for unschooled children in Italy. While unschooling is grounded in self-directed learning, community participation, and the recognition of children as active citizens, families in Italy must confront yearly examinations based on school curricula and standardized evaluation.

Drawing on lived experience as a parent of unschooled children, the paper examines encounters at the interface between families and schools. These interactions involve efforts to establish dialogue with teachers, principals, and educational authorities while explaining learning pathways that do not follow age-graded programs, disciplinary boundaries, or conventional instructional methods. Particular attention is paid to tensions arising from assessment procedures modeled on classroom learning.

The analysis highlights recurring experiences of misunderstanding, skepticism, and, at times, hostility. While unschooling families seek recognition of learning emerging through projects, community participation, reading, volunteering, travel, digital exploration, and everyday life, schools often struggle to evaluate knowledge beyond familiar academic formats. This creates a paradox: educational pathways broadly consistent with the learner-centered principles of the Indicazioni Nazionali per il Curricolo (2012) remain difficult to recognize within standardized systems.

The paper argues that this friction is not merely pedagogical but civic. The right of children to be acknowledged as legitimate learners is also a question of democratic recognition and educational pluralism. It concludes by proposing alternative assessment models, including portfolios, narrative documentation, community review panels, and mixed committees involving librarians, cultural educators, and independent educational officers. Such approaches may better capture diverse learning trajectories while fostering constructive relationships between institutions, families, and young citizens.