Conference Program

In the context of the digital transformation of education, it is not only the transfer of knowledge that is critical, but also maintaining a high level of student engagement. The traditional subject-based approach often leads to a decline in learning motivation due to the lack of visible connections between disciplines. Convergent learning, which combines biology, mathematics and IT, offers a psycho-pedagogical solution to this situation by creating conditions for deep immersion in an interdisciplinary context. It is important to justify the system of convergent tasks as a tool for developing students' subjectivity and internal motivation in the modern digital environment through the mechanism of visualised monitoring. The study is based on a systematic approach and the psycho-pedagogical theory of self-determination (E. Deci, R. Ryan). The key method is the pedagogical design of a hybrid environment, where solving complex bio-mathematical problems is associated with the use of a digital progress tracker. The tracker is seen not as a control tool, but as a means of supporting student autonomy and competence. Convergent problems are a powerful trigger for cognitive interest: the need to use IT tools to solve biological problems transforms the learning task into a research project. The progress tracker acts as an external regulator, promoting the gradual internalisation of motivation: clear visualisation of achievements in a digital environment reduces academic anxiety and increases the “sense of flow”. Psycho-pedagogical effects of monitoring: regular feedback through the tracker increases student engagement, ensuring their active participation even when working with cognitively complex material. In the synthesis of cognitive (interdisciplinarity) and motivational (digital tracking) components within a single pedagogical model. The practical significance lies in the development of methodological tools that allow subject teachers not only to integrate knowledge, but also to manage the motivational climate in the modern learning environment, ensuring the steady progress of each student.

The contribution presents activities carried out within the Erasmus+ project TEACH – Transforming Education: Achieving Innovation through Challenge-Based Learning, which investigates and pilots the integration of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) in vocational education and training (VET) as a pedagogical approach for fostering active and resilient citizenship. In a context marked by climate crises, socio-economic inequalities, and accelerated technological transformations, VET is likewise called upon to redefine its educational mandate, moving beyond a merely technical-instrumental vision to assume a public function oriented toward social responsibility and democratic participation.

Grounded in a theoretical framework that intertwines critical pedagogy, experiential learning, and inquiry-based approaches, the project conceives the “challenge” as an epistemic and social structure of learning. CBL is understood not only as a teaching methodology but as a transformative matrix capable of activating processes of collective problematization, deliberation, and co-construction of solutions in real-world contexts. From this perspective, the classroom is configured as a miniature public sphere (Fine, 2012)—a laboratory of democracy in which students and teachers exercise agency, critical thinking, and intergenerational responsibility (Galdames-Calderón et al., 2024).

A central component of the experience was the co-design and implementation of a structured teacher training pathway, developed in a blended format and through a participatory approach involving teachers and school leaders from five European countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, and Croatia). The activities integrated theoretical and methodological modules on CBL and its epistemological implications; workshops for the development of interdisciplinary challenges anchored in socio-ecological issues; and tools for fostering professional reflexivity within an emerging transnational community of practice. Teacher education was conceived as a transformative process of professional development aimed at strengthening facilitation skills, collaborative design competencies, and formative assessment practices oriented toward empowerment (Baggen & van den Beemt, 2024).

The course has then been made available as an e-learning toolkit, available in several languages. Within this framework, an open badge recognition system was also introduced to formalize and make visible the competencies acquired by teachers who became Teamchers—a hybrid professional figure integrating teaching, mentoring, and the facilitation of complex group processes. The badge does not merely certify learning outcomes; rather, it operates as a device of professionalization and symbolic legitimation, contributing to the construction of teachers’ identities aligned with pedagogical innovation and sustainability (Höffken & Lazendic-Galloway, 2024). Micro-credentialing thus becomes a tool of educational governance and a means for consolidating a European community of practice.

Preliminary findings from the pilot phase highlight a strengthening of students’ transversal skills—critical thinking, collaboration, and project-based agency—as well as a reconfiguration of assessment practices in a more dialogical and inclusive direction. At the same time, tensions emerged in relation to curricular constraints, schools’ organizational cultures, and the need for institutional support for a systemic adoption of CBL. Overall, the contribution offers a critical reflection on the potential of CBL in upper secondary education as a pedagogical infrastructure for educational democracy, interrogating the role of teachers’ training and professional recognition systems in promoting innovation.

Ensuring spaces for genuine participation to foster collective agency is a fundamental principle for building democratic communities, especially in academic contexts.

Universities, as privileged places for critical learning, must foster students' ability to influence decision-making processes and community life.

This study explores Photovoice as a participatory methodology capable of transforming university students into coproducers of knowledge, fostering critical awareness, empowerment, and lived democracy.

The project was implemented as part of a teaching experience within the Community Psychology program for community educators and community psychologists.

The methodological design was divided into four phases: 1) theoretical training on empowerment, participation and visual methods; 2) guided photographic production, to represent aspects of everyday life that escape common sense, to raise awareness among the academic community and stakeholders, and to advance proposals for change; 3) collective discussions structured according to the SHOWED model; 4) public feedback and deliberative dialogue with academic stakeholders.

The empirical corpus comprises 214 photographs. Each student captured, through 10 photographs, their perspective on an outdoor space nestled in a tree-lined green area on campus, which welcomes students for lunch breaks, studying, or socializing with each other and with faculty.

This informal yet democratic space represents a space for relationships, where they can build and enhance a sense of belonging to the learning community.

Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), integrated with principles of participatory analysis, highlighted three macrocategories: 1) the gap between formal representation and effective decision-making power; 2) daily micro-practices of informal democracy among peers; 3) structural and symbolic barriers that limit empowerment.

The process has produced transformative effects, in terms of operational proposals for improving campus life and for the development of critical and constructive awareness that sees formal and informal leadership engaged in democratic dialogue.

The findings suggest that Photovoice simultaneously functions as an epistemic device for community intervention, facilitating the co-construction of meaning and the activation of deliberative practices. The feedback initiative led to the establishment of a joint roundtable with students and faculty to review participatory practices, as well as the creation of a Student Voice laboratory. The study contributes to the debate on democratic education in the university setting, proposing Photovoice as a tool capable of integrating research, critical training and bottom-up transformation.

In increasingly complex and uncertain societies, primary geography education often remains focused on static knowledge, neglecting controversial and future-oriented issues. This limits opportunities for young learners to develop democratic agency and critical awareness of spatial inequalities. In this context, GEOCIVIS Project addresses the challenge of translating geography’s disciplinary potential into meaningful engagement with Socially Acute Questions (SAQs) (Catling, 2013; Wilks, 2010; Simonneaux & Legardez, 2010; Floro, 2011; Lupatini, 2021) in primary education, seeking to move beyond descriptive approaches towards relational and inquiry-oriented conceptions of geographical thinking, so as to frame social, environmental and political processes as spatially interconnected and open to critical investigation. In contemporary societies, primary curricula often acknowledge democratic citizenship as a goal yet provide limited guidance on how SAQs can be approached through disciplinary geographical inquiry. As a result, SAQs are often treated merely as topics, weakening geography’s analytical contribution to civic learning. Building on scholarship in geography education and citizenship education, GEOCIVIS explores how SAQs - such as migration, spatial justice, and socio-environmental conflicts - can be introduced as geographical problems and meaningfully integrated into teacher education and primary classrooms in Switzerland and Italy. The project combines literature review, policy analysis, and classroom-based case studies to investigate how curricular expectations around democratic citizenship are enacted in practice, and how inquiry-oriented pedagogies are supported or constrained by institutional and professional conditions. On this basis, it develops multilingual guidelines, scaffolding strategies and practical teaching tools. By fostering argumentation, cognitive decentering, and negotiation of diverse perspectives, GEOCIVIS aims to support teachers in framing geography education as a driver of democratic agency and sustainability from the earliest stages of schooling.

Awareness and engagement in reading comprehension are among the most important competencies that schools are expected to cultivate in order to support students’ educational success and their democratic access to culture. The PRIN project “Promoting Text Comprehension as a Tool to Make Learning and Thinking Visible” pursued this goal by implementing, in fourth‑grade primary classrooms, instructional protocols designed to foster readers’ engagement in the comprehension of twelve narrative texts. The present study is situated within this broader research framework and aims to examine how children responded to the prompts of the experimental intervention, which was grounded in the principles and materials of the “text‑centered” instructional approach (Cardarello & Lumbelli, 2019; Cardarello & Bertolini, 2020) and was implemented in two formats: paper‑based and digital.

The instructional protocol required students to work without direct adult guidance, following the prompts embedded in the materials—individually in half of the classrooms and in pairs in the remaining half. The exercises focused on the generation of inferences through challenging questions placed at key points in the text, sometimes repeated after the rereading of selected passages; on metacognitive prompts aimed at justifying one’s choices; and on the identification of the most relevant information to support the initial steps toward summarization (Lumbelli, 2009; Cardarello & Lumbelli, 2019). At the end of each session, in both the paper‑based and the digital experimental groups, feedback was co‑constructed through whole‑class discussions that brought to light the different arguments underlying the students’ responses.

More specifically, the study seeks to explore and document the possible development of awareness processes through which students can recognize their own errors. It examines whether, and for what reasons, children in eight fourth‑grade classes (two for each experimental subgroup: paper‑individual work, paper‑pairs, digital‑individual, digital‑pairs) revised their understanding of inferential passages by changing their responses after the rereading episodes explicitly prompted by the materials. This focus stems from the well‑established view that rereading and repetition of a reader’s “thinking aloud” support self‑correction (Lumbelli, 2009), and from the notion that the “error‑detection paradigm” is considered one of the most indicative comprehension‑monitoring processes reflecting a reader’s metacognitive control (Baker, 1984; Winograd & Johnston, 1982; Sylvestre, 2012).

Student responses were collected during the second and ninth sessions of the intervention, seven weeks apart. The results show that, regardless of the format (paper or digital) and the mode of work (individual or paired), children generally struggle to question or revise their initially expressed viewpoint. Overall, the study documents how students engaged with the instructional materials while reasoning autonomously through the experimental protocol and highlights implications for teachers and for future instructional interventions, both in paper‑based and digital reading contexts.

Prison education (PE) occupies an inherently paradoxical space: it operates within carceral institutions shaped by punitive logic while simultaneously aspiring to foster critical consciousness, democratic participation, and human dignity. SPARK (Supporting the Penitentiary system Advancement through Reflection and Knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity) is an Erasmus+ project that aims to advance intercultural prison education and, more in general, deprivation of liberty (DoL) contexts across national contexts where the pressures of penal and security-driven priorities may marginalise transformative educational practice.

SPARK brings together partners from across Europe to co-develop a shared framework for intercultural PE, responding to a landscape in which imprisoned populations are increasingly diverse in linguistic, cultural, and migratory terms (SPACE I, 2024), but prison education systems largely remain structured around monocultural assumptions. The project proceeds from the conviction that intercultural education in prison settings is not merely an addition or a reactive measure, but a fundamentally democratic act: one that contests the homogenizing forces of DoL institutions and opens space for hybrid subjectivities, relational learning, and critical reflexivity.

Methodologically, SPARK adopts a participatory, consortium-based structure that brings together universities, penitentiary institutions, and NGO-organisations across several European countries, like Italy, Spain, Estonia or Ukraine, aiming to achieve transnational collaboration that enables comparative analysis of how institutional arrangements, professional roles, and policy environments shape the conditions for intercultural educational practice in DoL settings. Particular attention is given to the ethical tensions inherent in researching within closed institutions, including questions of access, positionality, and the asymmetries of knowledge production between academic partners and incarcerated participants. By connecting universities, penitentiary administrations, civil society organisations, and practitioners across different national contexts, SPARK creates a transnational community of practice that challenges the isolation potentially characterising PE initiatives.

This contribution reflects on SPARK's design, early findings, and conceptual commitments. The contribution also presents preliminary results from the Spanish working group within the consortium. These include an account of educational initiatives already carried out in Spanish prison settings (both from previous initiatives carried out at the University of Alcalá, and from advances from the SPARK project), the preliminary design of an intercultural education course developed in dialogue with penitentiary practitioners, and an analysis of Spanish policy frameworks concerning translation, language mediation, and interculturality in prison contexts. In doing so, we aim at contributing to broader conversations about how PE can be conceived as a transformative democratic space, and about what an intercultural approach demands from both researchers and institutions.