Conference Program

Adolescents are increasingly immersed in digital environments where interactions often show limited respect for others’ emotions and dignity, and sometimes escalate into unlawful behaviors. In response to these challenges, several upper-secondary schools in the Cagliari metropolitan area have developed projects in collaboration with expert professionals and local institutions, aiming to help students gain awareness of the emotional dimensions underlying their online actions.

The empirical study presented here was carried out over three years and involved first- and second-year high school students working in small, heterogeneous groups. Through multimedia materials—videos, news articles, personal narratives, and testimonies—students were encouraged to discuss their experiences, reflect on the emotions emerging during these exchanges, and learn to identify and articulate them. This process addressed a likely lack of emotional scaffolding from primary socialization agents. Participants were also guided toward empathic reflection on the experiences of cyberbullying victims, who were often perceived as “frozen” or “emotionless” within digital settings.

Given students’ initial reluctance to engage with these topics, project facilitators worked to establish a climate of trust that gradually enabled more open discussion and self-exploration regarding digital behaviors. The initiative ultimately sought to help young people become more familiar with their own emotions, recognize and name them, and understand how they may become blurred or dissociated in virtual spaces.

The contribution will present the main findings emerging from these interventions, highlighting effective practices as well as critical issues, especially in light of the limited availability of in-depth national research on this phenomenon.

Building on the discussion of research findings, the paper examines adolescents’ practices for building interpersonal trust in digital contexts and explores ways to critically reflect on the approaches and skills needed to enhance adolescents’ digital literacy for democratic engagement.

Trust and democratic engagement are deeply connected and mutually reinforcing; trustworthy relationships enhance cooperation and social ties, and social participation fosters citizens’ contacts, mutual understanding, reduces fears of others, creating the conditions for building trust. Trust and public engagement are considered by Putnam (2000) to be essential components of social capital.

Adolescents use social media to maintain relationships with friends and acquaintances and to create opportunities for new interpersonal interactions. Online relationships, especially those involving people who are not part of the offline network, occur in contexts characterized by high uncertainty. In such context, social network’s users create and negotiate new strategies for reducing uncertainty in relation to the material actants (Hepp 2022) that populate situated interaction contexts (Roberts, S., & Ravn, S. 2019). Trust is a form of social action that reduces uncertainty and social complexity, thereby increasing decision-making and sociality (Seligman 1997; Luhman, 1979; Sztompka, 1999; Simmel, 1989).

In the field of adolescents’ use of social media, practices are relevant for observing young people’s agency (Hepp 2022; Costa 2018) and for overcoming the “influence” approach that considers users as passive and shaped by technological infrastructures. We present findings from the action research project informed by the agency approach, promoted by the University of Urbino, entitled “Building trust in adolescents' digital relationships”. The project involved 99 adolescents with an average age of 16.6 (24 males and 75 females). Visual methods were used to explore students’ practices in social networks (Instagram) when contacting peers who are not part of their friends’ network. They were asked to fill a template resembling an Instagram profile they could trust, by highlighting elements (photo, posts, bio description, etc.) they considered relevant.

Findings show that adolescents are active and reflexive actors when engaging in online relationships. Gender is a relevant factor in shaping online practices: both male and female adolescents refer to a female profile when drawing the identikit of the trusted other. Moreover, she is an authentic person, as she discloses her name and basic information about her life and interests. Girls are more willing than boys to start online relationships with the intention to continue them in offline contexts. Such findings show that online environments are not just contexts rife with risks, but highly normed spaces where adolescents exercise their agency and moral judgement.

Policies and digital literacy interventions should be oriented toward fostering digital agency, that is “the capacity to critically and safely navigate the Internet, enabling youths to express themselves, seize opportunities offered by Internet technologies, and safeguard themselves against potential online harm, often negotiating and challenging existing social norms and structures” (Choroszewicz 2024: 3). Our findings suggest that such a perspective could help children and adolescents to develop skills for participation and consultation both in online and offline communities.

In a European context marked by increasing multiculturalism and by pervasive use of digital technologies in the construction of identity (Landsberg, 2015), this contribution presents phases of a research project carried out in a heterogeneous, multicultural, and multilingual fifth‑grade classroom in a school at the center of Florence. The study examines the hypothesis that history education — understood here as the intergenerational transmission of memories with historical value — can promote greater mutual understanding, inclusion, and the development of intercultural historical competence (Green, 2019) when mediated through grandparents’ or parents’ narratives and supported by active methodologies (Barton & Levstik, 2021). The project involved 22 students (12 Female; 10 Male), including 8 with culturally diverse backgrounds. The young fifth‑grade students were therefore divided into two clusters (“Italian students” and “Students with a different cultural background”) exclusively for research purposes. An initial focus group between two student clusters revealed that students’ knowledge of one another was limited and often shaped by stereotypes. To overcome these barriers, the project required students to administer an open‑ended questionnaire to their grandparents (and, in some cases, to their parents) to collect autobiographical narratives related to seven crucial areas of their lives: family traditions, social relationships, schooling, work, leisure, personal and collective memories.

The collected stories made it possible to compare experiences originating from highly diverse contexts - from descriptions of postwar Italy to the wartime scenarios of the Balkan conflict (territories of the former Yugoslavia), as recounted by both a Serbian grandmother and a Croatian grandfather, and further to narratives of migration from rural communities in Honduras and Albania - thereby offering a plurality of historical and cultural perspectives. The unique and personal narratives shared by grandparents played a decisive educational role, confirming what the literature highlights regarding the value of family memory in shaping narrative identity, historical consciousness and socio-emotional competences (Souralova, 2020). The sharing of these stories in the classroom created a new space for dialogue, fostering processes of decentring, adoption of alternative perspectives, and a critical reading of cultural representations; in other words, it effectively supported an intercultural approach to historical learning (Nordgren & Johansson, 2015). Subsequently, a second focus group revealed a significant shift; students demonstrated greater openness, curiosity, and an enhanced ability to recognize mutually the complexity of their peers’ backgrounds.

Despite the limitations of a small sample, the practice showed that intergenerational transmission can serve as an effective pedagogical resource for promoting inclusion, historical thinking and global citizenship in multicultural school settings (Rantala et al., 2023). The grandparents’ narratives provided the class with a new ‘common ground’, contributing to the construction of a shared historical heritage and to appreciation of cultural diversity. The experience suggests that reciprocal knowledge rooted in family stories can emerge as a decisive factor in overcoming stereotypes and in fostering a deeper relationship between school, family and community, thereby generating a participatory ecosystem in which young students are valued as active citizens capable of building a sense of belonging (Buchanan & Fivush, 2023).

In contemporary societies, based on a culture of convergence, promoting democratic values—belonging, care for the common good, active citizenship—requires pedagogical approaches capable of engaging with and embracing digital languages without reducing the educational experience to passive consumption of content. The challenge lies in transforming technologies into tools for authentic participation from the earliest ages.

The theoretical framework of this paper centers on cultural heritage (CH) education in its tangible and intangible dimensions, viewing CH as a privileged reservoir of experiences, meanings, and collective memories from which to draw in order to develop cognitive, social, and civic competencies. From this perspective, CH is not conceived as a closed disciplinary content, but as a democratic and communal space in which learners engage in practices of citizenship: they recognize their cultural belonging, develop critical awareness of the places they inhabit, and assume responsibility for the commons.

This vision is rooted in the values of the Faro Convention and the National Plan for Cultural Heritage Education, which recognizes cultural heritage as playing a fundamental role in promoting peace, inclusion, and social integration, as well as providing an authentic and motivating context within which learning acquires meaning and becomes grounded in lived reality. It is also hoped for a critical and informed use of the channels and forms of expression offered by digital technologies as a vehicle for the broad inclusion of diverse social and cultural components through processes of identity construction, citizenship education, and the promotion of intercultural dialogue, in line with the design of civic education (Law 92/2019) and the Guidelines for the cross-curricular teaching of civic education (Ministerial Decree 183/2024).

The paper illustrates an action-research experience conducted as part of the UNESCO Project for the Knowledge and Dissemination of the Universal Value of the Historic Center of Naples, developed in collaboration between the Observatory on Governance for Education in Cultural, Artistic, and Landscape Heritage (OGEP3 Unina) of the University of Naples Federico II, the Municipality of the City of Naples, three local comprehensive schools, and the innovative startup GRETA s.r.l.

The program and workshop activities, focused on the key competencies of the 2018 EU Recommendation—digital, civic, and cultural awareness—placed the children in the role of creators: producers of multimodal cultural content and active builders of shared meanings within their own territory. The project developed a transmedia ecosystem of interactive cognitive artifacts based on XR technologies, structured into three complementary educational tools and integrated into the bilingual kit *Discovering the Historic Center of Naples, a UNESCO Site*. Through openness to the active participation of the public, communities, and schools, a willingness to listen, engage in dialogue, and highlight diverse perspectives, cultural sites have become spaces for the re-appropriation and reinterpretation of individual and collective identities. The emerging model, founded on collaborative public-private governance, interdisciplinarity, and experiential grounding, offers concrete guidelines for designing inclusive educational environments where democratic values are built through doing, narrating, and sharing with the support of digital technology.

The widespread use of digital tools in everyday life is also having a growing impact on children's lives. The way these devices are used during childhood is a significant factor in the education of citizens: although pediatric guidelines advise against exposure during the first two years and although use accompanied by an adult is recommended, passive use or situations in which the adult uses the device without being present at the child's side are frequent (Common Sense Media, 2025).The PRIN Di.Co.Each. project, developed in collaboration between the University of Florence, the University of Rome La Sapienza, and the University of Bologna, aimed to explore effective strategies for building digital competence from early childhood. Following a literature review, an interdisciplinary team conducted qualitative and quantitative research to assess the use of digital tools in children's lives and to survey the perceptions of families, educational services staff, and pediatricians. The project then included action research involving educators and teachers, which led to the design and implementation of digital education experiences with children and families (Di Bari, Demozzi, Metastasio, 2026).

Action research experiences have demonstrated the usefulness of a playful approach that also includes the use of digital media to explore the limits and possibilities of digital devices and that helps adults understand the need for support for children during their use. At the same time, research highlights how digital exploration experiences can be enriched by a playful framework and by exploring cross-fertilization with analog media. Nursery and preschool staff, starting with specific education, should then be equipped with the skills to design activities that effectively promote cross-fertilization. While educational services have the urgent task of raising families' awareness of their uses, it can also be beneficial to consider projects that combine traditional experiences with experiences in which digital tools, through their specific characteristics, can provoke questions, spark curiosity, encourage observation, and foster new explorations and achievements (Buckingham, 2019; Tisseron, 2023; Marangi, 2023).

These experiences provided input for the development of two guidelines, aimed respectively at families and educational services staff for children aged 0-6. The presentation will focus on the findings of the research and on the experiences of dissemination and discussion, seeking to reflect on the role of the educational alliance (between educational services and families) in building digital competence. ased on the findings of the Di.Co.Each. research, it is crucial to ensure that adults caring for children are informed and trained regarding the risks and potential of digital tools. A fundamental task is to nurture the educational relationship through digital technologies and, at the same time, gradually offer children the opportunities to become active, aware, critical, and creative citizens.