Conference Program

What does it mean to build an educational environment (Iori, 1996) that recognizes and addresses realistically and attentively the people who learn and develop within it? Is there room in educational spaces (schools, universities, community services, etc.) for the experiences of those (Iori, 1996), particularly children, young adults, and adults, who spend a significant part of their daily lives there?
While there is undoubtedly a close and important correlation between quality, democracy, inclusiveness, etc. of educational spaces and the architectural forms that characterize them, we ask ourselves why pedagogical knowledge does not pay greater attention to the connection between the physical and material dimensions of places designed for education and their symbolic dimensions (Iori, 1996; Manzini, 2021; Vanolo, 2024).
Starting from these premises, we will seek to question the need for close collaboration between those involved in education—pedagogists, educators, teachers, and architects/designers—in the increasingly pressing direction of a possible interpretation and design of educational spaces as spaces in which everyone can learn, grow, and live well, in the spirit of objective, physical, and relational proximity (Manzini, 2021).
We therefore believe it desirable to develop what we might call a Manifesto for Educational Living. Since educational living is a complex experience in the contemporary world, it inevitably draws on multiple disciplinary perspectives, ranging from pedagogy, psychology, anthropology, the sociology of cultural processes, architecture, and design, to name just a few of the most significant within the proposed reflection.

TThe bidirectional relationship between “Learning for Democracy” and “Democracy for Learning” highlights a virtuous circle in which democracy emerges not only as an object of learning, but also as a structural and cultural condition enabling meaningful learning. From this perspective, the design of educational environments acquires both political and pedagogical value: spaces, temporalities, mediating devices, and social relations actively support participation, dialogue, and shared responsibility. Conceiving the learning environment as a democratic act means acknowledging it as a site of deliberation, where heterogeneous subjectivities can speak, negotiate interests, and construct collective meaning, thus positioning the school as a deliberative ecosystem in which democracy is simultaneously an educational aim, a material condition, and a daily practice of learning (Biesta & Lawy, 2006; Fielding, 2011).

Within this framework, the co-design of school spaces by the school community plays a strategic role, as it rethinks the material, spatial, and organizational conditions of schooling while redistributing decision-making power among students, teachers, families, designers, and territorial actors (Chianese & Bocchi, 2023; Castoldi, 2020). Democracy, in this sense, is not merely a curricular content or institutional framing, but an everyday practice embedded in didactic and design choices: from spatial configurations to the use of educational technologies, from organizational flexibility to teaching practices.

Engaging learners from early ages in the co-design of school and urban environments as distributed and decentered learning spaces fosters sustainable, inclusive, and intergenerational practices that interconnect formal education with the urban milieu, enabling educational uses of public space and meaningful links between learning, citizenship, and lived environments (OECD, 2021; Chipa, Cannella & Mangione, 2023). Spatial co-design thus becomes a democratic act in which values, needs, and priorities are collectively negotiated, transforming space into a device for agency, participation, and belonging (Gehl, 2010). The contribution illustrates how collaborative design practices - from educational placemaking to integrated school-neighbourhood and school-city planning - can strengthen inclusion, wellbeing, community resilience, and active citizenship (Latham & Layton, 2019). In this perspective, the school becomes a civic and democratic laboratory capable of intertwining education, territorial welfare, and urbanity, making visible the circular relationship between democracy and learning (UNESCO, 2015)

Between 2016 and 2026, school makerspaces in Italy shifted from policy-driven equipment rollouts to contested, pedagogically uneven learning environments. Their institutional entry point is traceable to the National Digital School Plan (PNSD) and INDIRE’s Maker@Scuola research, active since 2014, which translated international maker discourses into school-relevant questions of architecture, curriculum integration, and teacher professional learning (Guasti & Nulli, 2021; INDIRE–EUN, 2020; Martinez & Stager, 2021). The decade’s most enduring lesson is civic as much as pedagogical: the makerspace, when it works, is not a room full of machines but a threshold space between school and community.

The INDIRE Makerspace Manifesto (2019) made this explicit: the school makerspace is a place where the institution “opens towards the outside, connects with an extra-scholastic reality, and renews its structures” — with separate external access and deliberate involvement of local institutions, civic associations, and economic actors. This directly anticipates the school-as-community-hub paradigm. As INDIRE’s research on learning environments argues, schools have become “spaces for dialogue between public administration and citizens, service centres for the territory, and reference points for the archipelago of associations operating in urban settings” (Tosi, 2019). The makerspace is the most concrete operational expression of this vision.

Yet this openness also creates fragility. Sustainability remains the field’s central unsolved problem. Equipment — laser cutters, 3D printers, robotics kits — is typically funded through short-term ministerial calls (PON/FESR) or European structural funds, with no provision for lifecycle costs: consumables, repairs, and the technical expertise required to keep shared tools operational. The Manifesto itself foregrounds this, identifying maintenance and technical development as one of the four core contributions a maker-partner must provide. When partnerships dissolve and funding cycles end, spaces fall into disuse.

Equally critical is teacher professional development. Research documents that teachers lack training not in machine operation, but in maker pedagogy: facilitating open-ended inquiry, assessing process over product, and positioning making as connective tissue between disciplines and community problems (Walan & Gericke, 2023; Quintana-Ordorika et al., 2024). The Manifesto draws a sharp distinction: technical formation can be outsourced to machine vendors, but pedagogical design competence must remain with teachers. Schools that conflate the two produce spaces that are neither effective nor genuinely community-facing.

The 2026 context adds urgency. Generative AI has intensified debate about hands-on learning, but this paper argues the opposite of obsolescence: physical making — rooted in Papert’s constructionism (Harel & Papert, 1991; Levin, Semenov & Gorsky, 2025) — becomes more valuable precisely because AI cannot replicate material agency, spatial reasoning, or collaborative production rooted in local context. A community-open makerspace is a site where students build with neighbours, and where AI augments ideation without displacing the cognitive work of making. Three priorities emerge: funding models covering full lifecycle costs; teacher learning focused on facilitation and community co-production; and making-with-AI curricula positioning fabrication and generative tools as complementary practices. The Italian school makerspace, where it has thrived, demonstrates that schools can be genuine community hubs — places where making together is a democratic act.

Patrimoni in valigia is a project co-designed by INDIRE and the Regional School Office of Tuscany that positions schools as active nodes within territorial learning ecosystems, capable of fostering democratization, equity, and well-being through the educational use of cultural heritage understood as a shared public good.

The project originates from more than fifteen years of research conducted by INDIRE on the pedagogical potential of cultural heritage in its broadest sense. This long-term reflection has emphasized the value of heritage as a tool for interdisciplinary learning, civic education, and community engagement. Within this perspective, Patrimoni in valigia focuses particularly on the INDIRE Antiquarian Collection of Youth Literature, a corpus of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century materials that offers a unique lens for examining how childhood narratives have historically contributed to the construction of stereotypes related to diversity and alterity. By engaging with these sources, students are encouraged to develop critical awareness of the cultural narratives that have shaped collective imagination and social perceptions over time.

The project involves teachers and students from both primary and secondary education, including adult learners in correctional settings, thus embracing a vertical and inclusive approach. It unfolds across four interconnected phases. The first phase includes the presentation of the project to schools and initial teacher training, accompanied by the delivery of a “suitcase” containing original heritage materials and reproductions selected by INDIRE on the theme of the foreigner and the “other.” The second phase consists of classroom-based action-research laboratories, designed and implemented by teachers with the support of INDIRE researchers and guided by a dedicated toolkit. During this stage, students explore the materials, reinterpret them, and produce new cultural artefacts.

The third phase focuses on public dissemination. Each participating school organizes a small museum-like exhibition open to the wider community, where students present the outcomes of their research and creative work—such as podcasts, videos, interactive pathways, written reflections, or artistic productions. This moment of restitution reinforces the role of the school as a civic center and a cultural hub capable of generating shared knowledge and fostering community participation. The fourth and final phase involves the digital publication of the materials produced, ensuring long-term accessibility and contributing to the creation of a distributed, open educational archive.

Within this framework, the school emerges as a community hub that connects heritage, territory, and the educational community, promoting collective agency, interprofessional collaboration, and democratic participation. The project also supports the development of the European Key Competences for Lifelong Learning (2018), particularly multilingual, intercultural, civic, entrepreneurial, and learning-to-learn competences. By combining heritage education, active methodologies, and community engagement, Patrimoni in valigia demonstrates how cultural heritage can become a driver of equity and everyday democracy. The contribution discusses preliminary results, the potential of the model, and future directions for strengthening territorial learning ecosystems.

How can we define the geometry of the "Not One Less" (2024) Purpose-built Network, which unites, through innovative forms of co-design, the eight Special Educational Resources (RES) Hubs for students with severe disabilities, located in eight comprehensive schools in Genoa (San Francesco da Paola, Voltri 1, Quezzi, Quarto, Pegli, Montaldo, Molassana-Prato, Teglia)? Only non-Euclidean morphologies can represent complex structures (micronetworks that simultaneously operate within a macro-educational constellation) that are nourished by constant relationships with places and contexts, highlighting the importance of institutional reciprocity (Mangione et al., 2025). Each Hub is a node in a fluid and flexible architecture, hosting forms of material life, legacies of the past, and scripts of possible futures. Central to this is the function of stroboscopic dynamics, in which changes and actions by the school allow for the interception and monitoring of territorial transformations and development axes. From the West (de-industrialized peripheral areas) to the East (lack of services), school communities and social organizations, in a symmetrical perspective, assume the role of multidimensional entities that teach and learn from each other within different problematic horizons (student vulnerability, high migration flows, family isolation, dilapidated school buildings). The "Self-evaluation reports of the eight schools (RAV 2025-2028)" show how each hub represents a strategic resource for strengthening shared administration and forms of subsidiarity (Bonasora, 2023), promoting a new educational and social contract that leads the educational institution to:

• address risks and emergencies with other public and private structures (healthcare providers, socio-cultural associations, public administrations);

• create interesting interprofessional groups (school staff, health and social care workers, and social cohesion workers) that implement unprecedented standards of action;

• coordinate with their local community and other hubs a flexible yet specific set of research and intervention spaces and times (school governance structures that are not episodic but rooted and structural) to address common critical issues—real or foreseeable—and ensure fair management and organizational outcomes;

• exchange professional resources (teachers, educators, healthcare workers) within co-planning and evaluation contexts, characterized by deep co-learning with families;

• become agency factors for associations, citizen groups, and sports facilities, highlighting avenues for urban and social regeneration and carefully managing the development of intergenerational cultures and relationships in the community;

• ensure caring and supportive school leadership, capable of fostering a cohesive mind-body relationship through the flexible use of digital tools (Gomez Paloma, Di Tore, Mangione, 2025).

In view of a renewed agreement for education, envisioned as a common good, the actions of each school principal have a networked and multi-faceted impact, ensuring inclusive and participatory resilience. Being resilient calls for "bouncing back and regaining ground," or new capacities for recontextualization, starting from mistakes, failures, and obstacles. The leader of the Genoa RES centers engages teachers, families, and experts; generates forms of symbolic recognition for all social actors; values ​​vertical and horizontal subsidiarity; "puts himself in others' shoes"; anticipates problems and solutions; and creates widespread pedagogical solidarity, encouraging moments of collective accountability as a priority phase of enacted co-responsibility.

The conceptualisation of schools as community hubs calls for a redefinition of schooling as a civic and spatial infrastructure embedded within broader social, cultural, and urban ecologies. In this perspective, democracy is not limited to governance structures but unfolds through the design of learning environments that ensure equitable participation and epistemic justice. This view resonates with Dewey’s conception of democracy as a mode of associated living, enacted through educative environments (Dewey, 1916). Issues of spatial justice—understood as the fair distribution of educational opportunities, voice, and symbolic recognition across interconnected learning spaces—become central to rethinking both school organisation and teacher preparation.

This contribution interprets Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a democratic infrastructure capable of supporting such ecosystemic transformation, focusing on initial teacher education as a generative site of change. Drawing on ecological learning theories and Whole School Approaches, UDL is framed not as a compensatory toolkit for inclusion but as a systemic design paradigm that restructures environments, interactions, and assessment practices to enable plural forms of participation.

The study presents an empirical case from a 60-CFU initial teacher education programme in Italy, developed within the national inclusive education framework (Legislative Decree 66/2017, amended by 96/2019), which emphasises shared responsibility, accessibility, and co-planning among educational actors. The programme was intentionally designed as a micro-ecosystem connecting university coursework, partner schools, and local professional communities.

Teacher candidates engaged in multilayered instructional design tasks, co-design laboratories, and reflective mentorship processes aimed at fostering collaborative agency and ecosystemic thinking. The programme was grounded in principles of pedagogical congruence, ensuring alignment between the methodologies presented and those enacted within the training environment, so that future teachers could experience inclusive and participatory design not only as content but as lived professional practice. Data sources included reflective portfolios, instructional artefacts, peer-feedback exchanges, and structured observation notes collected during laboratory activities. Qualitative analysis focused on three interconnected dimensions: the shift from transmissive lesson planning to ecosystemic design; the emergence of shared professional agency within learning communities; the redefinition of assessment as dialogic feedback supporting collective growth.

Findings indicate that when UDL operates at the structural level of teacher education, it functions as a democratic enabler: it redistributes epistemic authority, legitimises diverse modes of engagement, and supports future teachers in conceptualising classrooms as relational hubs embedded within civic territories. In doing so, teacher education becomes a prototype of spatially aware and socially responsive practice, where learning design actively addresses inequalities not only at the individual level but across interconnected educational spaces.

Generative AI tools were introduced as background amplifiers of access and differentiation; however, technological mediation remained subordinated to ethical, relational, and spatially conscious design principles.

By repositioning initial teacher education as a laboratory of democratic ecosystemic practice, this study foregrounds teacher preparation as a strategic lever for advancing equity, participation, and spatial justice within contemporary learning ecosystems.