Conference Program

In the context of socio-cultural transformations driven by the digitalization of communicative processes, schools are increasingly called upon to rethink their role as public spaces for democratic education. Educational communication can no longer be understood as a mere transmission of contents, but rather as a complex pedagogical device that structures educational relationships, participatory processes, and the shared construction of knowledge (Dewey, 1916; Rivoltella, 2012). In everyday classroom practices, this shift often translates into concrete difficulties in sustaining genuinely dialogical and participatory spaces of communication. From this perspective, the quality of communication in school settings becomes a decisive variable for sustaining the educational pact and for enabling the exercise of conscious democratic citizenship (Biesta, 2011).

This paper proposes a re-interpretation of educational communication as a practice of didactic and cultural mediation, capable of supporting processes of inclusion, dialogue, and mutual recognition within educational contexts increasingly shaped by digital languages, hybrid environments, and technological platforms (Rivoltella & Rossi, 2019). Communication is interpreted here as the symbolic infrastructure of educational democracy: it shapes power relations in the classroom, students’ forms of participation, and the conditions for building genuinely inclusive learning communities (Habermas, 1981).

Within this framework, digital environments and emerging technologies – including artificial intelligence systems – redefine modes of interaction, access to knowledge, and the negotiation of meanings, raising new challenges for the educational responsibility of teachers and school institutions (Floridi, 2019; UNESCO, 2023). The risk is that communication may be progressively colonized by algorithmic logics, communicative simplifications, and transmissive models that weaken critical thinking and students’ democratic participation (Selwyn, 2019).

Drawing on contributions from pedagogy, didactics, and communication studies, the paper analyses the school as a laboratory of communicative democracy, in which the quality of communicative practices becomes a condition for the construction of dialogical, equitable, and participatory learning environments (Biesta, 2011; Rivoltella, 2012). This calls for continuous reflective work on teachers’ communicative practices, often taken for granted yet decisive in shaping processes of inclusion and exclusion. Particular attention is paid to how conscious educational communication can counteract phenomena of exclusion, relational fragmentation, and communicative poverty, fostering students’ agency and shared educational responsibility (Rivoltella & Rossi, 2019).

Finally, the contribution argues for the need to renew education for communication in school contexts, understood as a transversal competence for democratic citizenship, capable of integrating critical, ethical, and participatory dimensions. Only through communicative practices oriented towards dialogue, reflexivity, and shared responsibility can the school’s role as a public space for democratic formation be strengthened within the contemporary communicative ecosystem (Dewey, 1916; UNESCO, 2023).