Conference Program

Hospital school represents a liminal educational context, characterized by radical vulnerability, temporal discontinuity, physical constraints, and a strong external direction of time and decisions. In such an environment, education is traditionally interpreted according to a compensatory logic, oriented towards curriculum maintenance and the prevention of dropout.

This contribution takes a pedagogical-social as well as didactic perspective and proposes a redefinition of hospital school as a privileged social laboratory of educational democracy and radical personalization of learning, transcending the deficit perspective and embracing the expression of talent as a universal educational right.

The central thesis is that, in healthcare contexts, agency cannot be considered a pre-existing resource of the student, but must be understood as a pedagogical outcome (passive healthcare vs. intentional and active educational care), intentionally constructed within conditions of dependence and vulnerability. In this sense, the semantics of the word “care” is redefined, as a new paradigm of social pedagogy, in its double meaning of “to cure” and “to care”, which recalls the double etymology of education as educare and ex-ducere.

The theoretical framework integrates critical pedagogy, the capability approach, the pedagogy of vulnerability, and Umberto Margiotta’s theory of education, reinterpreting agency as the subject’s epistemic positioning – that is, a stable internal disposition as a tendency to act actively and effectively in the real context, to transform it according to a project of improvement – and advocacy as an ethical-pedagogical practice of addressing vulnerability.

This integration gives rise to the AAT (Agency–Advocacy–Talent) model, formalized in the relationship: Talent = f (Constructed Agency X Intentional Advocacy). In this model, agency and advocacy co-construct each other in a recursive cycle that generates empowerment and potential development.

Methodologically, the AAT approach is not a standardized operational method, but rather a design approach for the construction of mediated educational environments, in which tools such as expressive workshops, authentic tasks, storytelling, narrative portfolios, personal projects, and creative digital media find a preferential place, as privileged tools for the emergence of talent as a production of meaning, rather than a performance.

From this perspective, the hospital school presents itself as a micro-ecosystem for talent development and an extreme context for testing educational democracy: not only by ensuring access to education for all, but by defending the right of every student, even the vulnerable, to build a personal vision and self-project for the future, according to the principles of educational and social justice. In this sense, talent becomes an indicator of educational justice, and vulnerability becomes not a limitation to be compensated for, but an ontological condition to be inhabited and embraced, as a generative space of possibility.