Conference Program

Introduction

Sabir is a project aimed at fostering critical learning in the Mediterranean by producing new IBL activities for high school students [1]. Sabir is addressed to the Mediterranean IAU NAEC community [2], and it involves six countries: Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey. The project is conducted through a co-design method in all its phases, based on past experiences [3].

In Sabir, the basic idea is to select some non-IBL activities and to transform them into IBL ones, through a collaborative process among peers [4]. In the scientific literature, there is an agreement about the essence of inquiry as “learning science as science is done” [5, 6]. Moreover, even if the efficacy of the IBL methods is largely accepted [7], there are major effects influencing its adoption in classrooms, such as the social environment, teachers’ training, and the cultural heritage [8]. We mainly wished to identify: a) the main challenges influencing the co-design of IBL activities (Q1); b) the extent of the efficacy of IBL activities in different contexts (Q2); c) the main factors influencing the efficacy of IBL in different contexts (Q3).

Method

Sabir was designed to be held both online and in-person.

During the online meetings, we discussed the general meaning of IBL according to different situations and we rebuilt our own scheme of an IBL activity. The NAECs proposed some existing and tested activities to be developed as IBL co-designed activities, then we started to transform them into IBL ones: we discussed all together about the main idea, the link to the national curricula, how to engage the students in the scientific challenge, what inquiries the students could choose to conduct, what would be the necessary materials/software/real data to foster an interdisciplinary approach and so on. We repeated the process of presenting, discussing and proposing further developments.

During the in-person phase, a 1-week long residency, the NAECs discussed the activities in pairs, with the help of a facilitator. The presenting NAEC collected the suggestions and implemented the activity before the following bi-lateral meeting. At the end of the week, all the NAECs were requested to write down the final version of the activity.

Conclusion

Our goal was to evaluate how efficient the process of transformation of an activity into an IBL one was and if it had an impact on the Mediterranean community involved.

We wished to understand how effective the inquiry is when the activities are proposed in different countries and which are the major challenges.

A co-design process is not straightforward. It can be very slow, especially when happening online. On the other hand, the discussion in pairs that followed during the in-person residency was much more efficient, also facilitated by the fact that NAECs knew each other from collaborating together in past projects. This confirms that working on the community (and as a community) has a strong impact on the outcome of such a project. As a final product, we published the IBL transformed activities on the IAU education platform astroEDU [9].

Educational institutions are not only spaces for academic instruction but also critical arenas of socialisation where young people develop perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about society. Among the many attitudes shaped during childhood and adolescence, views on socioeconomic inequality are of particular importance, as they may symbolically legitimise or challenge the existing social order and contribute to either the reproduction or the transformation of persistent social disparities. This paper draws on a three-year study in Chile that examines how schools shape students’ attitudes towards socioeconomic inequality. Situated in one of the world’s most unequal societies —where the top 1% of households capture 27% of national income— the project seeks to understand how students make sense of inequality and how schools can contribute to social cohesion.

Building on sociological and educational research, the project advances two main premises. First, attitudes toward inequality are not only structured by class position but also by inter-class relationships. Encounters with peers from different social backgrounds can expand social comparisons, stimulate reflexivity, and undermine stereotypes (De Schaepmeester et al., 2021). Evidence from Chile and elsewhere suggests that socially diverse networks increase awareness of inequality, reduce belief in meritocracy, and foster support for redistribution (Otero & Mendoza, 2024). Second, schools constitute privileged micro public spaces (Amin, 2002) for such inter-class encounters. Compared to families or neighbourhoods, schools provide broader and sustained opportunities for interaction across class lines. In contexts of diversity, schools can foster citizenship attitudes such as empathy, solidarity, and tolerance, aligning with Allport’s (1979) intergroup contact hypothesis. However, diversity does not automatically translate into egalitarian learning: it may also generate conflict, micro-aggressions, or internal segregation (Blalock, 1967; Garces & Jayakumar, 2014). Consequently, the project examines not only the structural composition of schools but also their pedagogical, organisational, and community practices that mediate inter-class relationships.

Using a mixed-methods design, the research combines a national quantitative analysis of schools’ internal socioeconomic diversity with ethnographic fieldwork in socioeconomically mixed schools. At the conference, preliminary findings will be presented, including: (a) ethnographic evidence on inter-class relationships among students; (b) the schools’ responses to socioeconomic heterogeneity; and (c) the schools’ pedagogical strategies to promote democratic competence and attitudes towards inequality. The findings aim to inform international debates on how diversifying schools can promote more egalitarian social attitudes. Ultimately, the project will provide critical evidence for public policy to promote schools that foster the development of egalitarian attitudes and potentially help reduce social inequalities.

Since its introduction in Trentino in 2010, the debate tournament ‘A suon di parole’ has experienced exponential growth over 15 years. It now engages the majority of local higher secondary schools (as well as some institutes from neighbouring regions) and has involved approximately 17,000 students in Italian-language debates. This scenario expands further when considering participants in German and English competitions, and all students taking part in internal school qualification rounds.

Two primary factors seems to be responsible for the success of the tournament:

• its adaptable debate format: developed ad hoc, it integrates into both curricular and trans-curricular teaching, proving particularly effective for civic and citizenship education.

• its being a student-centered "game": the core of the tournament's appeal is its focus on student agency. Participants actively research, verify information, and then demonstrate what they can do with their knowledge — testing their skills in and through the debate.

Existing analysis already acknowledges the tournament's role in fostering teamwork, rational verbal dispute, critical thinking, and listening skills.

This talk focuses on the most recent research project on ‘A Suon di Parole’, aimed at a systematic evaluation of the participants’ experience in the changing scenario of the last few years, marked by a widespread use of artificial intelligence and a growing crisis in democratic values and practices. Through a questionnaire distributed to a sample of students and teachers with repeated debate experience, aspects related to both argumentative and socio-emotional skills are explored in order to assess the tournament's impact on critical thinking and interpersonal competencies as perceived by teachers, tutors, and, especially, students. Moreover, by incorporating items from a 2016/2017 version, the questionnaire will track changes in perception over time, offering a valuable longitudinal perspective.

The next phase of the research will involve a qualitative, in-depth analysis of distinguished practices and approaches adopted by individual classes and institutes. This will provide nuanced insights into the tournament participation, in its possible forms and results.

This plan promises to add substantial empirical evidence to the understanding of participating in ‘A Suon di Parole’ as a powerful educational practice, documenting its evolving impact on students' cognitive and interpersonal development in rapidly changing times.

Social studies education is increasingly tasked with helping young people, and those preparing to teach them, navigate complexity, uncertainty, and contested knowledge, while cultivating the dispositions necessary for democratic life (Cohen & Cohen, 2025; Hawkman, 2023; Rodriquez & Swalwell, 2023). In this context, we ask: What does it mean to teach elementary social studies education methods to preservice teachers in a moment marked by political polarization, intensifying global crises, and democratic erosion? How might reflexive journaling operate as a method for democratic learning within social studies education?

Our paper draws on a collaboratively taught social studies methods course where reflexive journaling functioned as a central methodological practice for both instructors and

pre-service teachers. Kathy is a PhD student, Contract Academic Instructor, and former middle school Social Studies teacher. Melissa is an assistant professor and former secondary history teacher. Together, we designed and co-taught the course to 70 pre-service teachers during the winter of 2026 at a mid-sized university in New Brunswick, Canada. Course content included Indigenous education, rights and responsibilities, decision-making, Black histories, place and space, protest and social movements, community, environmental stewardship, and geography.

Grounded in Black feminist theories of knowledge that foreground lived experience and embodied learning (hooks, 2014; Lorde, 1978), our reflexive journaling emerged as a shared space for wondering, noticing, feeling, questioning, and meaning-making together around complex social studies issues. Feminist traditions of teaching and learning have long positioned journaling as a practice of critical self-reflection and relational knowing - one that values intimacy, connection, and communities. hooks (2013) captures this orientation when she notes that “we write because language is the way we keep a hold on life…We communicate to connect, to know community” (p. 22).

This commitment to relational meaning-making and community directly informed how journaling functioned as a key method within our social studies methods course. Our collective journaling aligned with Ross’s (2024) assertion that social studies teaching and learning should support learners in developing personally meaningful understandings of the world and their capacity to act within it. The practice of journaling invited students to think with the course - tracing personal, emotional, and professional shifts as they encountered the pedagogical tensions of teaching social studies in polarized times. Students’ entries, alongside our own, engaged with discomfort, uncertainty, and contradiction, connecting course concepts to experiences, current events, media texts, and emerging identities as social studies educators.

This paper draws on our instructor journals and a sampling of students’ journals, including visual artifacts and narrative writing, to examine how this method shaped our collective learning during a moment marked by global uncertainty and social upheaval. Our findings suggest that reflexive journaling emerged as a methodological anchor for making sense of social studies teaching and learning in a world on fire (see Morrowu, 2026; Khonina & Salway, 2025; Stefanovich, 2026). Functioning as a powerful form of methodological innovation, reflexive journaling empowered educator and student voice and centered relational accountability while fostering critical thinking and a shared sense of purpose and community.

In a context marked by democratic fatigue and political polarisation schools and educational actors face the urgent task of fostering democratic competence and critical thinking among young people. At the same time, debates surrounding radicalisation and deradicalisation highlight profound moral and pedagogical dilemmas: how can educational interventions strengthen resilience to extremist narratives without becoming forms of counter-indoctrination? How can educators intervene meaningfully while respecting freedom of thought and expression?

This paper presents and reflects on In Search of the Lost Past, a civic education role-play designed to address dynamics of alienation and polarisation that may contribute to processes of radicalisation. Rather than focusing on deradicalisation as a corrective intervention after the fact, the tool adopts a preventive and educational perspective, aiming to cultivate democratic literacy, critical thinking, and pro-social resilience. Designed for use in schools, youth centres, and community settings, the role-play engages participants in structured simulations that require them to reflect on available choices and anticipate the consequences of different courses of action. Through co-participation and co-construction, participants explore contested conceptualisations of common values, learning to recognise alternative perspectives. In doing so, they experience cooperation, responsibility towards a shared goal, and the tensions inherent in democratic decision-making processes.

Drawing on implementation experiences, the paper analyses the pedagogical design of the tool and discusses its contribution to strengthening critical thinking skills, fostering personal efficacy and cultivating open-mindedness and respect for different worldviews. By situating deradicalisation-related concerns within a broader civic education framework, the paper highlights an approach that seeks to avoid the limits of ideological imposition while still addressing the risks associated with extremist narratives. The final aim is to demonstrate how participative activities can contribute to democratic competence and resilience by equipping learners not with predefined answers, but with the tools necessary to navigate complexity in plural societies.