Conference Program

Severe illness and chronic pain conditions do not merely cause school attendance interruptions but impact the temporal, relational, and agentive structure of the subject's experience. In this sense, hospital and home schooling can be further valorized not only as compensatory measures for curricular continuity but as practices capable of sustaining experiential continuity in situations of vulnerability.

This contribution proposes expanding the notion of educational continuity through an ontological, phenomenological, and hermeneutic perspective on pain, understood as a temporal and transformative process of experience. Pain, especially in chronic or protracted forms, does not present itself as an isolated episodic event but as a qualitative reorganization of the experiential horizon. It reconfigures the field of perceived possibilities - what, in ecological terms starting from Gibson and in recent enactive reinterpretations (Coninx & Stilwell, 2021), has been described as the field of affordances, i.e., perceived possibilities for action - restricting access to practices, relationships, and future projects. Illness alters time perception, compromises projectuality, and modifies the sense of belonging to the school and social context.

In this framework, school interruption is not merely an organizational issue but can amplify a discontinuity already underway on the experiential level. The absence of shared educational practices risks consolidating the contraction of the subject's horizon of possibilities. Conversely, the pedagogical relationship in hospital or home settings can contribute to reopening the agentive field: through relational continuity, the ritual of learning, and linguistic and hermeneutic mediation, understood also as a dialogical space of mutual recognition (Gadamer, 2018), it supports the connection between past, present, and future, countering relational isolation and fostering the narrative coherence of the student's identity. The analysis integrates phenomenological and narrative studies on pain - including research on the ontological modelling of pain narratives drawn from a dataset of over 800 accounts (Cipriani 2025) - with a neurophenomenological perspective, recognizing that transformations in painful experience involve bodily, affective, and cognitive dimensions, including capacities for anticipation and planning, dimensions directly implicated in the student's ability to engage with educational processes. In this perspective, educational continuity concerns not only access to content but the recognition of the student as a temporal and projective subject whose experience has been reorganized by illness.

The objective is not to replace existing pedagogical models but to offer a theoretical framework capable of dialoguing with them and making explicit the temporal and relational dimensions already operative in educational practices. From this viewpoint, educational justice does not exhaust itself in formal equality of opportunities but implies support for reconstructing the horizon of possibilities of the ill student.

Hospital and home schooling thus emerges not only as a didactic intervention but as a pedagogical care practice that contributes to recomposing the existential continuity interrupted by illness.