Conference Program

In current debates on neurodiversity, education, and social justice, inclusion is increasingly understood not as a set of compensatory measures aimed at “fixing” individuals, but as the transformative capacity of educational and social environments to welcome difference, enable meaningful participation, and make rights and dignity concrete in everyday life. From this perspective, families’ viewpoints are a central source of knowledge: parents witness how opportunities and barriers are continuously produced through the interaction of schools, services, informal networks, and local communities, shaping learning trajectories, belonging, recognition, and overall quality of life. This framing resonates with the “Pedagogy of Parents”, which values families’ experiential knowledge and educational competence, and acknowledges their role as active interlocutors in the relationship with institutions (Tortello & Pavone, 1999).

This paper presents a mixed‑methods study conducted in Italy on parents’ lived experiences and representations of their children’s school and social inclusion in the context of neurodivergence, with Down syndrome as the most frequently encountered condition (Dal Molin & Bettale, 2005). The study aims to: describe how families define and assess “real” inclusion by distinguishing between attendance, active participation, and recognition; identify organisational, relational, and instructional factors that support or hinder full participation at school and in social life; and examine sport and extracurricular activities as educational settings connected to well‑being, autonomy, and citizenship, and as potential bridges between school inclusion and broader social inclusion (Contardi, 2016).

The research adopts a mixed‑methods design. The quantitative component is based on approximately 300 original questionnaires completed by parents of children and young people aged 3 to 20. The questionnaire covers five areas: background information on the person with disability and the family; relationships and social inclusion at school; the educational pathway and inclusive educational practices; sport and extracurricular activities; and an open final section for additional comments and recommendations. The qualitative component consists of 20 in‑depth interviews with parents, aimed at reconstructing both parents’ and children’s pathways and recurring turning points in family experience, including: the “first communication” of the diagnosis/condition, relationships with schools and the construction of educational alliances, future-oriented concerns regarding social and employment inclusion, leisure time as a space for sociality, well‑being, and autonomy development, and relationships with institutions—across rights, bureaucracy, and recognition.

Integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence allows the study to connect patterns emerging from the questionnaires with the explanations and meanings articulated in parents’ narratives. In particular, parents’ accounts highlight a crucial distinction between inclusion as mere attendance and inclusion as full participation: being physically present in the classroom does not automatically translate into being recognised, actively engaged, and supported in building meaningful relationships (Moletto & Zucchi, 2013). The “Pedagogy of Parents” lens further supports an interpretation of these accounts as situated educational competence: parents bring not only needs and requests, but also grounded interpretations, strategies for fostering autonomy, and everyday mediation practices that negotiate expectations, institutional constraints, and what local contexts concretely make possible.