Conference Program

The project “A Door to Welcome”, carried out in first-year lower secondary school class, originated from the students’ desire to facilitate the inclusion of a classmate with Autism Spectrum Disorder, R., who was unable to cross the classroom door and attended lessons alone in the adjacent room (Mostafa, 2008; Bogdashina, 2021).

This situation of self-isolation prompted his classmates to reflect on how to welcome him: for them, it represented exclusion and inequality (Booth&Ainscow, 2014; Demo, 2015; d’Alonzo, 2018; Cottini, 2019, 2025) and injustice. The art teacher, urged by R.’s classmates, discovered that he meticulously drew subway station signs, an interest that fascinated him, and developed with the students the project “A Door to Welcome”.

The project is grounded in the principles of inclusive education (Cottini, 2018; Sandri, 2019), cooperative learning (Dishon&O’Leary, 1984; Dunn&Dunn, 1978), differentiated classroom (Tomlinson, 1999, 2001, d’Alonzo, 2016) and in key concepts (Marcarini, 2016): coevolution (Canevaro, 2008; Sandri, 2019), affordance (Gibson, [1979], 1999), semantotopic approach (Franceschini, 1995), legibility (Lynch, 1960; Kaplan, S., 1987), integrative framework (Zanelli, 1986), and world-environment relationship (Mustacchi, 2002), within a perspective of equity and democracy.

The project have two phases. The first starting from reflections on the symbolic function of the “door” (Biedermann, 2004), sliding doors were built from recycled materials and installed in the classroom, creating an environment similar to a subway carriage (Hall, 1969; Kaplan, S., 1987; Mura, 2011; Gaines et al., 2018). Through this mediation, R. gradually became familiar with the classroom space until, in the second year, he definitively entered the classroom and participated in school activities with his peers.

The following year, the students asked to continue the project by adding a new symbolic element, “The Support,” namely the handhold ring to grab for safety.

This second phase aimed to foster reflection on personal potential with particular attention to an equity-oriented perspective (Sen, 1982) within an inclusive framework that means “embracing an ethic of justice” (Sandri, 2019, p. 109), so students may contribute to helping, involving, and including others by focusing on the person and their specific characteristics (Cottini, 2025), in order to recognize and understand their own developmental process in which neurodiversity could become both a resource and a strength and also an opportunity to understand that each of them is different and that everyone must have the same opportunities according to a democratic vision

Each student, including R., reflected on their own character considering how they could support other people. All created a ring on which they wrote the type of support they could offer.

Welcoming R. into the classroom by finding an appropriate strategy fostered a transformation in all students, as each learned to recognize neurodiversity and to accept the characteristics and ways of functioning of every individual within a vision of reciprocity aimed at developing a democratic relational approach. It offered everyone to enrich their learning within a friendly micro-context of coevolutionary respect (Sandri, 2019), to develop a culture of differences and citizenship within a welcoming environment for all (Cottini, 2025).