Conference Program

This study explores a crossmedial workshop with migrants and refugees through the lens of lifelong learning. Learning is conceptualized as an adaptive (Iavarone, 2025) and transformative process (Mezirow 2003) that emerges through care, embodiment, creativity, and collective meaning-making. Within this framework, narrative practices (Hoggan, 2009) are understood not merely as pedagogical tools, but as epistemological devices capable of questioning dominant knowledge regimes, fostering agency, voice, and democratic participation.

The contribution presents a laboratory conducted within the cooperative for reception and integration LESS Cooperativa Sociale (Naples, Italy) in a non-formal educational context during Italian L2 courses for Unaccompanied Minors. The experience is situated within a doctoral research project in experimental pedagogy and is framed as a participatory action research process (Orefice, 2006). Educational intervention and qualitative inquiry are therefore conceived as intertwined dimensions of a single transformative practice. The methodological design integrates participant observation, autoethnographic field notes (Biffi, 2025) focus group and the collection of narrative and audio materials co-produced with participants, in order to account for both learning processes and relational dynamics unfolding in everyday educational settings. Podcasting (Sottocorno, 2025) was introduced as a multimodal practice combining oral language development, storytelling (Menéndez, 2025) sound exploration, and collaborative scripting. Participants were involved in all phases of the process, from the definition of themes to recording and editing, thus occupying active roles as authors and cultural producers rather than as passive learners or research subjects. The narratives (Marmié, 2024) addressed experiences of migration, daily life in reception facilities, aspirations, and encounters with Italian society, generating a shared narrative space where individual trajectories could be recognized and negotiated collectively. The researcher assumed a dual position as educator and participant-observer, explicitly reflecting on positionality (Holmes, 2020) power relations, and ethical responsibility. Autoethnographic observation functioned as a tool for tracing moments of rupture, resistance, emotional intensity, and learning transformation, as well as for interrogating the implicit pedagogical assumptions embedded in institutional language education practices. Attention was paid to how linguistic vulnerability, silence, humor, and embodied forms of expression contributed to the construction of meaning beyond standardized notions of communicative competence. The present findings suggest that podcasting could operate simultaneously as a linguistic resource, a pedagogical device, and a research method, enabling forms of counter-narration that challenge homogenizing representations of these jeunesses en movement (Marmié, 2025). More broadly, the study highlights the potential of personal biographies (Erel, 2007) to reconfigure educational and research spaces as sites of care, relational ethics, and political subjectivation. By integrating transformative learning theory, participatory action research, and creative-based methodologies, this paper argues that it is possible to enhance the quality of wellbeing and integration, particularly within complex and vulnerable educational systems. However, as often occurs in pedagogical research conducted in targeted settings, the findings are not generalizable. Further investigation is needed to refine these methods, strengthen their transferability, and develop specific impact indicators capable of assessing their effectiveness across diverse educational contexts.