Conference Program

The paper presents the process that led to the construction in a primary school in Veneto of “Wood Snoezelen” – the first multisensory environment made of untreated wood for pupils with disabilities – and the following establishment of the start-up “SenseAble Wood”, aimed at designing and building these environments, that can help schools to become inclusive hubs for communities.

The most recent data about the Italian school population confirm a trend: due to the demographic decline, there has been a strong decrease in the number of school-age children (900,000 fewer from 2004 to 2024); in the next 8 years, the number of students will fall below 6 million (Il Sole 24 Ore). Given this scenario, a consequence will be an increase of available spaces in schools, which can be used for functions other than teaching, including therapeutic ones (WHO). At the same time, in recent years, the number of students with disabilities increased significantly, approximately 75,000 from 2018/2019 to 2023/2024, about 26% (ISTAT), a trend due to both the decrease in population and growing awareness of disabilities.

This scenario is the “Wood Snoezelen” project framework, which began in October 2021 with the research project 'Wood Snoezelen. Multisensory wooden environments for the care and rehabilitation of people with severe disabilities', co-funded by Università Iuav di Venezia, Consorzio Legno Veneto and Bozza S.r.l., aimed at the detailed design of a multisensory room for people with disabilities, neurodevelopmental disorders, SLDs, intellectual disabilities, rare genetic diseases and ADHD, with interior components – internal partitions, raised floors, false ceilings, furnishings – made entirely from untreated wood.

The project aimed to combine, for the first time, the “snoezelen” approach, which uses multisensory instruments for stimulation – bubble tubes, optical fibres, projectors, hammocks, tubs with coloured plastic balls, water beds – with an environment made of untreated wood, which, thanks to the release of substances called terpenes contained in the raw material, has a positive effect on mental and physical well-being and reduces heart rate and anxiety levels (CAI-CNR).

The research project led to the construction of the first “Wood Snoezelen” room at the “G. Marconi” primary school of the Istituto Comprensivo of Lozzo Atestino (Padua), inaugurated on Februray, 28^th 2025 and currently used, also by the local people, with the target to create a school that is not only more inclusive, but can also be a support for the community. At the same time, the continuous use of the room will make it possible to verify the effects of the combined approach of “snoezelen” equipment with a wooden environment, thanks to the ICF-based monitoring and evaluation forms developed in collaboration with the La Nostra Famiglia Association.

Given this scenario, and the interest concerning the “Wood Snoezelen” room, the project continues with the establishment of the start-up “SenseAble Wood”, which recently took part in the MIT and Start Hub incubation programmes, ranking first in the latter, with the aim of spreading environments that are high quality from both architectural and therapeutic point of view in schools.

In contemporary debates, the term transition describes shifts toward new technological, social, economic, and ecological models. In this contribution, however, transition is understood not as a linear trajectory but as a condition of structural indeterminacy in which consolidated territorial systems must redefine their balances. The infrastructures that supported the habitability of the twentieth century, such as public services, no longer coincide with the social geographies for which they were conceived. Transition thus emerges as a crisis of meaning and governance, rather than simply a matter of sectoral adjustment.

Within this framework, schools become a privileged field of observation. Widely distributed across settlements and composed of recurring urban elements, schools intercept a network of actors operating at different decision-making scales and therefore offer a sensitive observatory for investigating contemporary conditions of habitability. Therefore, when the relationship between this everyday-life infrastructure and its inhabitants becomes unbalanced, its spaces and imaginaries require reconsideration.

In this scenario, the OECD explores four possible evolutions of education systems in response to ongoing socio-educational transition: Schooling Extended, which imagines the expansion of formal education and broader access; Education Outsourced, which foresees fragmented educational provision through digital platforms and homeschooling; Schools as Learning Hubs, which interprets schools as community-based educational centers connected to territorial learning networks; Learn-as-You-Go, which envisions continuous forms of learning supported by digital ,and non, environment. Translating these scenarios into practice requires a process of territorialization, capable of examining how such hypotheses take shape within specific material and relational conditions.

The research addresses this process of territorialization through a methodological device inspired by the cinematic technique of shot-reverse shot, used to explore the relationship between school and territory. This approach frames schools both as educational infrastructures and as territorial hubs where spaces, actors, and practices interact.

The shot is constructed through the analysis of three action-research processes developed in Sardinia, in which the school acts as a territorial actor. In the first case, the school opens to the territory by welcoming associations and local enterprises and integrating teaching with field-based learning practices. In the second case, it participates in the identification and reactivation of an unused space, experimenting with different degrees of transformation in nearby areas. In the third case, the school extends into the neighborhood and engages with the professional world through mapping activities and dissemination tools, both digital and spatial, through which the knowledge produced is shared.

The reverse shot shifts attention from the school to the territorial conditions that enable distributed educational practices. Here, the territory itself can be interpreted as an educational infrastructure within a broader territorial learning ecosystem.

Through the interplay between shot and reverse shot, the research constructs a collection of spatial elements, actions, and actors involved in these processes. This perspective highlights schools not only as educational institutions but as civic public hubs within territories in transition where learning practices, spatial transformation, and collective action intersect, enabling communities to experiment with different ways of learning and collectively re-imagining the urban space as a shared lifelong learning ecosystem.

School libraries are increasingly recognised in international research as multifunctional educational spaces capable of supporting literacy development, student wellbeing and civic participation. In line with the IFLA-UNESCO School Library Manifesto (2025), the school library is progressively framed as a learning, cultural and community hub: a flexible environment connecting formal and informal learning, cultural production and relationships with local communities.

As a learning hub, the school library can be understood as a “third learning space” in which cognitive, critical and socio-emotional competences are developed through interdisciplinary, inquiry-based and collaborative practices (Elmborg, 2011; Raffaele, 2021). Research highlights the role of the school library as a space where analogue and digital literacies intersect, making it a laboratory for bi-literacy and digital citizenship that supports the development of information, media and digital competences and reinforces the role of school librarians as literacy educators (Cooksey, 2024; Merga, 2020). School libraries can also positively influence school wellbeing by providing quiet environments that support concentration, emotional regulation and a higher-quality learning experience (Merga, 2020; Merga, 2022).

As cultural hubs, school libraries function as infrastructures that connect students, teachers, families and communities to books, knowledge resources and cultural opportunities (IFLA-UNESCO, 2022). This role becomes particularly significant in contexts where access to cultural resources is limited. In disadvantaged communities, school libraries may represent crucial points of access to books and learning materials (McDowall et al., 2025), particularly in rural areas (Mdodana-Zide & Chimbi, 2025), metropolitan peripheries marked by poverty and social hardship (Pribesh et al., 2011), small schools or communities lacking public libraries (Mangione & Pieri, 2021), and high-poverty and racially diverse communities (Lance et al., 2023).

As community hubs, school libraries can operate as open nodes within local community networks and broader learning ecosystems (IFLA-UNESCO, 2025). In this perspective, they can function as bridges between schools and local communities, strengthening relationships with families and local actors and supporting participation through partnerships, extended services, intercultural initiatives and civic-oriented activities (Kranich, 2024). They can also collaborate with public libraries to expand community access to cultural and educational opportunities (Lee, 2024; Moreland & Kammer, 2020).

This paper presents findings from two national studies conducted by INDIRE in 2025 and 2026 within the research project Avanguardie Biblioeducative. The research combines a national survey involving more than 6,800 teachers and school leaders with qualitative data from focus groups, interviews and observations carried out in selected school contexts. This mixed-method design makes it possible to examine both large-scale trends and situated practices through the perspectives of school leaders and teachers.

The results highlight the emergence of practices that strengthen the relational and community role of school libraries, including family involvement, extended opening hours and partnerships with cultural institutions and public libraries. At the same time, structural and organisational constraints continue to limit the consolidation of school libraries as community-oriented learning environments in the Italian context.

By examining both emerging practices and current challenges, the paper contributes to the discussion on how school libraries can evolve into community-oriented learning infrastructures and strategic nodes within local learning ecosystems.

Building on the Australian framework on the development of schools as community hubs and civic centers (Cleveland et al., 2023) — which describes different developmental stages in the relationship between schools, families, and communities — this analysis uses data from the SET questionnaire to identify, within the Italian context, schools whose spaces, orientations, practices, and organizational conditions are consistent with this model. In particular, the data analysis makes it possible to identify a group of schools in Tuscany that show an advanced level of openness to the community and a structured integration between the school and out-of-school use of spaces, especially as far as inclusion and well-being are concerned (Chipa et al., 2022; Orlandini & Panzavolta, 2025). The SET study (Spazi Educativi Toscani / Tuscan Educational Spaces) was developed through the collaboration between the Regional School Office for Tuscany and INDIRE (Infante, Moscato & Panzavolta, 2024). The questionnaire explored the impact of interventions funded through the PNRR and other funding lines activated since the post-pandemic period on the transformation of learning environments in Tuscan schools. The aim of the study is to provide a shared basis for reflection in order to better understand the goals pursued, the results achieved, and the contribution of these changes to the construction of schools that are more inclusive, welcoming, and innovative.
The research adopts a mixed-methods design (Creswell & Clark, 2018), structured in an initial phase of theoretical systematization followed by quantitative data collection through an online questionnaire. The resulting dataset is then mapped and analyzed in order to identify particularly relevant cases to be further investigated through case studies in selected pilot contexts.
Starting from the collected database, schools were subjected to a classification process aimed at identifying homogeneous profiles with respect to the goals declared by institutions in relation to the interventions carried out. The analysis involved a cluster analysis approach (unsupervised grouping), designed to segment the sample into internally coherent and mutually distinct groups. The results highlighted four main clusters, which can be traced back to different policy and action orientations: inclusion, pedagogical innovation, civic center, and well-being (as in the “whole-school approach to well-being”). This contribution presents a number of Tuscan schools assigned to the civic center cluster, characterized by an advanced level of openness to the community and collaboration with local stakeholders, as well as by a stable integration between the school and extracurricular use of spaces. The selection of the case studies was guided by the aim of identifying experiences consistent with the developmental trajectories outlined by the Australian framework, in order to highlight organizational configurations and decision-making processes aligned with this interpretive perspective. Based on this subset, the paper describes: (i) the structural characteristics of spaces and facilities; (ii) the collaborative dynamics among school and community actors; and (iii) the governance and coordination mechanisms that make it possible for the school to function as a civic center.

Many theories identify a physical space like a fundamental element in early child development, but also in the years that follow. Recalling the role of space as a third "teacher" proposed by Malaguzzi, this contribution attempts to consider, albeit in a limited way, some projects that involving a deep transformation in the city and in schools (Carr, Lynch, 1968).

In this regard, research clarifies how the physical learning environment represents an important segment that can facilitate a sense of competence, create opportunities for exploring, learning and play (Barbiero et al., 2021; Unicef, 2021). Indeed, references inform about the necessity of nature exposure for health development of young people and enormous risks derived by nature-deficit disorder (Louv, 2005; Kuo, 2015). Regular access to green spaces has mental health benefits for children (Kaplan et Kaplan, 1989, 1995; McCormick, 2017) and promote the development of soft skills, improve cooperative and environmentally sustainable behaviors (Zelenski, 2015; Goldy, 2020).

Several initiatives have been launched over the last decade to make green spaces accessible to children, students, and, more generally, the entire resident community in highly impervious areas. In this vein, schools have long been viewed as potential catalysts for urban and environmental regeneration (Renzoni, Savoldi, 2026). Thanks to their widespread distribution, they can now be mobilized to respond to multiple needs and address some of the crises. Without questioning the merits of these interventions in terms of actual multi-species design, demonstrate the necessity of focusing on the relationship between education and space, between education and living.

Donna Haraway (2025) tell us of urgency to create «a terrestrial revolutionary subject», so in this direction we link democracy to research of beauty and justice and we can image school like a big agorà: on the skin of square flourish a complex relationships between humans and other living species in a new idea of a community hub. In this way, the sense of community including more-than-human, where every single critters have rights to exist.

Schools can represent for this a crucial element in an urban setting: opening its gates, to host collective activities in the afternoon or on a weekend, creating a new dialogue which blurs the boundaries between inside and outside.

The “skin of school”, seen from this perspective, can represent a fertile ground for experimenting with the establishment of new types of complex relationships, as is already happening innovatively within the Les Cours Oasis in Paris and Colegio Reggio in Madrid (Delaunay et al., 2022; Chiesi, Ciaravella, 2024).

This contribution, starting from some case studies (Paris and Madrid), want to reflect on the attempts of these projects of combining education, environmental learning and multispeciesism through urban programs or isolated good experiences.

The COVID-19 pandemic represented a critical turning point for Italian small and rural schools. In such contexts, school closure entails not only educational discontinuity but also social and demographic weakening. Building on a multi-year research trajectory conducted within the “Movimento Nazionale delle Piccole Scuole”, this paper reconstructs the pedagogical and institutional evolution that led from proximity schooling during the pandemic to the conceptualization of small schools as community hubs, coherently aligned with the OECD (2020) future schooling scenarios. The pedagogical framework integrates four interconnected perspectives. First, the critique of the forme scolaire (Maulini & Perrenoud, 2005; Vincent, 1994; Landri, 2020), whose organizational closure is challenged by small schools’ multi-age structures and strong territorial embeddedness. Second, democratic and ecological pedagogies (Dewey, 1902; Bronfenbrenner, 1979), which conceive the school as a participatory micro-society embedded within relational systems where democratic habits are cultivated through cooperation and civic engagement. Third, the notion of proximity schooling as theorized in INDIRE studies (Mangione & Cannella, 2022; Chipa et al., 2025), where territorial alliances—often formalized through Educational Pacts—mediate between curriculum, local identity and social justice, integrating formal, non-formal and informal learning within a shared responsibility framework. Fourth, the distinction between the extended or diffused school (Mangione, Cannella & Chipa, 2025) and the community school as learning hub (Chipa et al., 2025). While the extended school expands pedagogical environments by framing the territory as co-educator, the community hub represents a structurally consolidated configuration in which alliances evolve into stable multi-agency governance infrastructures, enabling the school to act as a civic and socio-educational stronghold. Within this evolution, alliances progressively move beyond pedagogical collaboration toward coordinated multi-agency frameworks integrating curricular provision with extracurricular services, skilling and reskilling initiatives, socio-educational support, cultural mediation and health-related interventions. The school thus shifts from being an expanded learning environment to becoming a territorially embedded welfare and learning hub. Methodologically, the study adopts a phenomenological and interpretative orientation (Bertolini, 1988; Giorgi, 2009; van Manen, 2014) within contemporary qualitative research traditions (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018). Conceiving educational transformation as lived and situated experience, the inquiry develops as a longitudinal qualitative research pathway combining instrumental case studies (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Yin, 2018) with narrative inquiry and situated observation of practices enacted in fragile contexts. Cases were selected for their generative value in illuminating emerging configurations of school form rather than for statistical representativeness. The analysis is guided by the conceptual framework of the forme scolaire, used as an interpretative lens to examine how small schools reconfigure key dimensions of schooling—such as the organization of space and time, pedagogical relationships, and the boundaries between school and community. In addition, perspectives from futures studies in education frame reflection on possible school futures as a reflexive exercise through which institutions reinterpret their role and open new spaces of action in the present (Facer, 2021; Landri, 2024). Findings indicate that the transition from proximity schooling to community hub thus represents not an emergency response but an evolutionary redefinition of school form in fragile territories.