Conference Program

In reception settings, young migrants often arrive with difficult life histories and traumatic experiences that are deeply entangled with ongoing global challenges, from geopolitical conflicts to climate crises and socio-economic disparities. While existing literature often approaches care as an individual relationship, less attention has been paid to the collective practices that underpin educational and care pathways. This ethnographic study explores the work practices, resources, and challenges of practitioners employed in reception services for young migrants in Italy. Although the research did not initially set out to study teamwork as such, the iterative engagement with field data gradually highlighted teamwork as a key resource for addressing everyday challenges in reception work.

The study is informed by the perspective of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), which offers a conceptual framework for interpreting socially distributed and negotiated practices. The research was conducted at an educational and social community in Rome that hosts approximately 180 adolescents and young adults aged between 16 and 22 each year. The data corpus includes 11 ethnographic visits (approximately 50 hours of observation) and 9 narrative interviews with practitioners and coordinators. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2022) was conducted on observational reports and interview transcripts.

The findings show that the work team perform four interrelated functions: (1) consolidating belonging, identity, and shared values; (2) preserving and transmitting practical knowledge; (3) enabling coordination and connectivity across boundaries; and (4) managing critical situations through collective reflection and emotional containment. In this way, the team’s local action creates a transformative environment not only for the young people in care but also for the professionals themselves, supporting continuity and long-term sustainability. The analysis also highlights the “costs” of collaborative work. Teamwork is time-consuming, may complicate the inclusion of newcomers, requires continuous negotiation, and can generate conflict, particularly when operational urgencies and institutional constraints limit opportunities for dialogue.

The study highlights the importance of investing in both formal and informal team practices as key social infrastructures that sustain coordination, learning, and professional identity in complex, resource-limited care contexts.

In a context marked by democratic backsliding and accelerating socio-ecological crises, Learning Communities (LCs) are increasingly framed as transformative environments that extend learning beyond the boundaries of individual institutions (Agostini 2016). While many LC models are grounded in neighbourhood-based community pacts, we argue that LCs must also be reconceptualized as trans-local democratic infrastructures capable of connecting situated educational practice with broader European civic engagement. Such infrastructures foster student agency and participatory competence through project- and problem-based learning, applied inquiry, and collaborative classroom projects, enabling schools to engage with complex societal challenges while connecting global knowledge to local contexts.

We illustrate this principle through Schools Beyond Regions and Borders (SBRB), a transnational Learning Community linking secondary schools across thirteen European countries with universities, regional authorities, and civil society organizations. Drawing on socio-ecological perspectives and the theory of situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), we conceptualize schools as nodes within a multi-level learning ecosystem, where knowledge circulates across institutional and geographical scales and is interpreted in locally meaningful ways. SBRB combines centralized access to expert knowledge with locally contextualized classroom projects, enabling students to engage critically with issues such as gender equality, peacebuilding, hate speech, and environmental sustainability, to name a few. While cross-school collaboration is not systematically prescribed yet, the framework already facilitates conditions for trans-local reflection and dialogue, supporting a distributed learning space that balances common thematic engagement with local autonomy.

In line with Biesta and Lawy’s (2006) notion that democracy is learned through participation rather than transmitted as content, SBRB emphasizes learning processes in which students actively engage with complex issues, interpret them in relation to their local contexts, and apply insights in classroom projects, fostering critical thinking, agency, and participatory competence. Based on observations from student engagement, classroom activities, webinar interactions, and teacher reflections, we discuss emerging patterns shaping trans-local Learning Communities, including the ways global knowledge is locally interpreted, the role of institutional partnerships in sustaining participations, and conditions that enable or limit cross-school collaboration. Building on Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner’s (2020) work on value creation in social learning spaces, our reflections highlight the importance of durable alliances between schools and higher education institutions, strategically supported by digital infrastructures, in maintaining continuity, reciprocity, and the transformative potential of trans-local LCs.

Overall, SBRB exemplifies how a Learning Community framework can extend the democratic space of schooling beyond local boundaries while preserving contextual sensitivity. The case demonstrates that multilevel learning infrastructures, combining centralized expertise with locally situated pedagogy, offer a replicable model for schools seeking to foster critical agency, collective knowledge, and active engagement with complex societal challenges.

The co-production of community knowledge presents the challenge of mutual understanding across languages, cultures and constantly changing contexts. The promotion of Learning Communities (LCs) is also facilitated through pedagogical research oriented towards decoloniality, in which participants can actively engage (Kindon et al., 2017; Lenette, 2022). In this sense, it is worthwhile to develop pathways of ‘experiential research’ aimed at generating processes and outcomes that have a significant impact on the quality of life within communities, taking into account the diverse characteristics of LCs (Deluigi, 2024; 2026). In this collaborative framework, all participants contribute to the creation of knowledge, guided by objectives shared by an open and dynamic group that identifies with common interests, closely tied to concrete realities (and therefore subject to change). Throughout the various phases of work and self-exploration, a culture of learning is fostered, drawing on joint reflection and auto-ethnographic insights linked to the strategies and actions implemented (Bianchi, 2025; Gariglio, 2025). This leads to the enhancement of widespread learning; consequently, knowledge becomes the group’s heritage and does not belong to a single expert figure, often external to the community.

Promoting processes of co-creation, in which the agency of those who initiate or facilitate the path is oriented towards fostering active community environments, restores a tangible and recognisable value to participation (Chick et al., 2025; Kapoor-Jordan, 2009). Paradigms that favour reciprocity, moving away from extractive practices, are committed to building spaces for dialogue to be understood as a genuine process of shared consciousness-raising amongst those participating in action research, as subjects and agents of problematising diversity (Freire, 1987; 2010; Glissant, 1996). Decolonial educational research, therefore, fosters plural narrative spaces within LCs, activating non-rhetorical participatory movements (Hare, 2021; Muraca, 2021; Reason et al., 2008). In this sense, LCs become an indispensable subject for animating spaces of co-creation in which social innovation has a transformative value (Fabbri-Capaccioli, 2025; Sarkissian et al., 2010; Zoletto, 2023).

These framework elements enable us to retrace consolidated experiential action-research projects between the University of Macerata and several socio-educational services of the Koinonia APS Association, in Kilifi and Nairobi (Kenya), outlining some longitudinal features of participatory perspectives in a multi-faceted manner amongst: researchers who question their own critical positions and engage with many ‘elsewheres’, initiating explorations and new educational geographies; educators who work daily in the field, in situations systematically marginalised, placing proposals for emancipation and new horizons of a sustainable future at the forefront; university students who choose to be guided through a continuous mediation between theoretical knowledge, prefigurations and the lived experience of community; children, adolescents and young people who experiment with cooperative learning dynamics, charting trajectories of solidarity, peer mentoring and liberation from prescribed marginalisation (Cuccu, 2022; Deluigi, 2019; Deluigi-Cadei, 2019; Deluigi-Gozzelino, 2022; Deluigi-Aruba, 2023).

The paper will highlight the dynamic characteristics of decolonial research, engaged in actions that support LCs, which take shape in times and spaces that constantly activate reflective thinking and committed action as factors giving meaning to a ‘pedagogy on the move’ capable of adopting collateral perspectives.

In Italy, like other developed countries, the education system faces the challenge of making schools more inclusive and adapted to current social challenges, fostering in particular the integration of children and youth who, for various reasons, are disadvantaged (growing up in vulnerable families or disadvantaged neighborhoods, or being neurodivergent and therefore having specific educational needs). School dropout and poor results in international school tests are the most obvious symptoms of public education’s inability to address the most “problematic students”.

In recent years, a broad national debate has been developed on the need to adopt community pacts at the local level, through collaboration between teachers, families, and civil society associations. Albeit employing different approaches, these initiatives aim to experiment inclusive projects involving students experiencing greater difficulties, by using informal learning techniques, often integrated with conventional classroom teaching activities.

The article reviews main research findings on two inclusive school experiences, both initiated by third sector organizations and inspired by the idea that a community learning strategy can be employed in order to improve the academic careers and civic activation of students who are falling behind. The first is Maestri di Strada, an association of educators founded in the 1990s to provide educational opportunities for street children living in Naples' most difficult neighborhoods. La Ricostituente network was created more recently, in 2020, by a social worker with the aim of empowering young people (17-19 years old), including those with traumatic experiences, to express their views on the future of Italy through the rewriting of articles of the Constitution. Drawing on the evidence emerging from the two case studies, carried out with a mix-method research design (narrative interviews with key informants, participant observation and documentation collection), the potential of pedagogical approaches based on cooperative learning, as well as of project and team work, will be explored in depth. Likewise, the genesis of these associative groups and their relationship with educational institutions will be rigorously examined, focusing on another essential factor in making educational practices truly transformative.

Challenging behaviors exhibited by young children in early childhood classrooms have been interpreted through a deficit lens in which behaviors are attributed to the child, parenting, or genetic traits. Children from marginalized communities, such as those who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC), those who have disabilities, or those who live in poverty, are subject to such attributes. In these multilayer perspectives, children who are exhibiting challenging behaviors are seen as being oppositional and intentional rather than as responses to trauma. Trauma is not typically considered a plausible explanation for the behavior (Bartlett, 2019).

This presentation examines how early childhood educators who participated in a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) focused on trauma in professional learning sessions shifted their interpretations of challenging behavior from a deficit lens to responding to the behavior from a trauma lens. This shift facilitated educators' understanding of relational and contextual care. This research explores how an RPP sustained collaborative planning between research and educators, resulting in a relational, trauma-informed lens that supported educators and practices over time.

The foundation of this research was based on the framework of an RPP (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2024; Hendrick et al., 2017, 2023). This framework focused on long-term collaboration between educators and researchers to solve complex issues and problems through research on educational improvements and equitable transformations. Another foundational component of this research was based on the framework of SAMSA’s guiding principles to a trauma-informed approach, which includes safety, peer support, trustworthiness and transparency, collaboration, and empowerment (SAMSA, 2026). Both frameworks position learning as a collaborative process in which educators transform their beliefs about challenging behaviors through a trauma-informed lens and the impact that trauma has on child development and behaviors.

A qualitative case study was used to investigate how educators perceived and described challenging behaviors, and how those perceptions and descriptions evolved after participation in a professional learning community embedded within an RPP. There was one research question addressed in the study: 1) How do early childhood educators’ perceptions of challenging behaviors shift over time following participation in a sustained professional learning community?  

There were 6 educators from a rural community in the Southeastern United States who participated in the study, and data were collected from a qualitative survey before the professional learning community started and again four years later. Participants consisted of both lead teachers with bachelor’s degrees and teaching assistants with a two-year degree. Open-ended qualitative surveys that explored participants' descriptions of challenging behaviors that occurred in the classroom, as well as perceptions of trauma-informed care, were used to collect the data.

Preliminary results indicated a substantial shift in the perspectives of educators’ beliefs about challenging behaviors. Pre-interview results framed challenging behaviors as intentional or caused by poor parenting practices or genetics. Post-interview results revealed a shift in perceptions of challenging behaviors and connected the behaviors to trauma. Participants described implementing strategies that were based on relationships and brain development. These findings indicate that professional learning through an RPP can transform perceptions and practices.