Conference Program

Shrinking, ageing and with fewer and fewer young people: this is how Italy looks today. The decline in the student population and the downsizing of the school network raise questions about the future of school buildings, especially in small municipalities and fragile areas. The redevelopment of existing schools is becoming strategic: not only as a functional, energy and regulatory upgrade, but also as an opportunity to rethink schools as civic infrastructure and public spaces. Innovative and inclusive teaching practices require a rethinking of learning spaces, while the building, accommodating functions other than school ones, is transformed into a place for the community, ensuring its survival, especially in peripheral contexts.

The contribution – the result of the 2017 PRIN PRO.S.A. Schools to live in. New architectural models for the construction, renovation and resilient restoration of school buildings and for building the future in Italy research project – focuses on small schools in peripheral areas. Although at risk of closure, they continue to play an active role, becoming privileged laboratories for new models of educational space and integration between architecture, pedagogy and the community.

Through spatial analysis, the research reveals the architectural potential of schools as authentic “community architectures”, open to new educational and civic uses, and investigates their role as territorial hubs capable of activating participation, inclusion and social innovation.

The focus is on both internal and external spaces: entrance halls serving as welcoming spaces, corridors that can be transformed into informal learning areas, classrooms that open out onto the outdoors, and open spaces – courtyards, gardens and surrounding areas – as key elements in ensuring the school’s flexibility and openness to the local community. Their configuration, permeability and relationship with public space become design levers for accommodating new civic, cultural and educational functions – laboratories, fab labs, environmental centres, health centres – promoting interaction between schools and communities and strengthening the role of schools as multifunctional hubs for the local area.

By collecting and organising a substantial number of case studies in a thematic atlas, the research, using observation points at different scales and starting from the assumption that the existing situation is a possible terrain for even unexpected projects, shows how the typological variety of small schools offers real opportunities to experiment with new pedagogical and architectural approaches.

Permeability, flexibility and territorial integration become fundamental tools. Opening, welcoming, transforming: the school becomes an educational and civic hub, where learning is community and the community itself becomes school.

International and national frameworks increasingly conceptualize schools as democratic learning ecosystems capable of integrating educational, social, and territorial resources (OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2021). Within this vision, schools are called to act as community-embedded learning environments that support students' development throughout their educational pathway. In Italy, the Linee guida per l'orientamento (MIM, 2022) recognise orientation as a continuous educational process of self-construction, beginning in early childhood, aimed at fostering self-awareness, confidence, and recognition of individual interests and potential across all levels of education.

This paper explores how Education Outside the Classroom (EOtC) (Lauterbach, Bølling & Dettweiler, 2023), informed by Early Career Education perspectives (Del Gobbo, Frison & Galeotti, 2021) can function as a pedagogical leverage for lifelong orientation, enabling exploratory encounters with the world of work and supporting students’ reflection on possible futures. In this framework, early career education is viewed as a series of educational activities that, while connected to the school curriculum, extend beyond the classroom through territory-based exploration. This broadens students' understanding of opportunities, interests, and personal aspirations, supporting self-exploration and identity development rather than prescribing vocational choices.

The study was conducted in a rural comprehensive institute located in a mountain area of Northern Italy, involving selected classes from kindergarten, primary, and lower secondary school (N = 87 students). The research adopted a participatory action-research design and all classes participated in a locally-rooted orientation project, combining community exploration with classroom-based reflective activities. This was designed to foster a vertically coherent approach across educational levels. The local territory — civic institutions, local enterprises, and cultural heritage sites — functioned as an extended classroom (Frabboni, 1980), offering students authentic encounters with work-related practices and local professions. Within this broader framework, a ricerca-formazione pathway (Asquini, 2018) was carried out with primary school teachers, resulting in the co-design and implementation of a four-day immersive EOtC experience involving two primary school classes, During this process, research questions and educational objectives were collaboratively defined with the teaching team.

Data collection combined qualitative and quantitative tools including teachers' and students' logbooks, field notes, interviews and pre- and post-experience questionnaires with both participating and control classes (Trinchero, 2002). Logbooks supported the iterative redesign of activities and formative evaluation. Reflective sessions facilitated by the researcher explicitly linked EOtC experiences to themes of self-awareness, interest exploration, and future orientation in a lifelong perspective.

Preliminary findings suggest that structured EOtC experiences foster meaningful contact with professional practices and stimulate students' reflection on their personal interests, competencies and aspirations. At the institutional level, the ricerca-formazione process enhanced teachers' professional reflexivity regarding their orienting role and contributed to envisioning a shared vertical orientation curriculum. This paper argues that territory-based educational experiences can function as a pedagogical infrastructure for lifelong orientation in rural contexts in particular, positioning schools as relational hubs that connect learning, community resources, and students’ exploration of possible futures.

The educational provision of early childhood services (0–3) and preschools has long drawn on the spaces immediately surrounding educational settings as fundamental mediators of children's experience. Through the exploration of the local environment, educators and teachers support the acquisition of everyday competencies and knowledge, reconfiguring children's experiences within a structured horizon of meaning. Every space — corridors, threshold environments, shared areas, classrooms, courtyards and gardens within the service; streets, squares, shops and public parks beyond its walls — becomes an educational imprint within diversified, complex, and interrelated experiences (Bertolino & Guerra, 2021).

The establishment of the integrated system of education and care, designed to guarantee "all children, from birth to six years of age, equal opportunities to develop their potential for relationships, autonomy, creativity, and learning, in order to overcome inequalities and territorial, economic, ethnic, and cultural barriers" (Legislative Decree 65/2017), both affirms and radicalises this vision. The 0–6 Integrated System constitutes an educational continuum accompanying the child from birth to six years through an articulated network of services — from nurseries and micro-nurseries to spring sections, from supplementary services to state and accredited preschools — conceived in close interconnection with one another and with the wider community context. The system's core innovation lies in the Childhood Hubs (Poli per l'infanzia): shared spaces in which the 0–3 and 3–6 segments coexist, fostering educational continuity and the construction of a community of care and learning that brings together children, families, and educators within a shared project (Rosa, 2025).

The theoretical framework of this contribution integrates three complementary perspectives. The first is that of the Extended School (Scuola Estesa), which interprets educational continuity both vertically — between nursery and preschool — and horizontally (Mangione et al., 2025), between institution and territory, maximising local pedagogical traditions and transforming the integrated system into a permanent cultural resource for the entire community. The second is that of the Community Hub, which reframes 0–6 services as vital centres capable of generating social cohesion and connecting families, services, and local resources. The third is that of the Whole School Approach, a holistic strategy that engages all members of the educational community — staff, children, families, and the wider territory — in the shared construction of genuinely collaborative, supportive, and inclusive environments (Rosa, 2024).

The forms through which the integrated 0–6 system may be concretely configured are multiple, offering responses calibrated to the traditions, specificities, and needs of individual territories. The Puglia Region has in this respect developed a range of strategies that have been the subject of INDIRE research through case study methodology. The findings make it possible to identify models in which preschool educational provision takes shape as centres of social aggregation and learning ecosystems situated at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and pedagogy, offering transferable insights for the development of territorial educational policy.

In recent years, international debates on education have increasingly framed schools as community hubs capable of connecting learning, civic participation and local development. Within this perspective, youth participation and the recognition of student voice have emerged as key dimensions for fostering democratic and inclusive educational environments. As Cook-Sather (2006) argues, educational systems cannot be effectively redesigned without listening to the perspectives of the students they are meant to serve.

Recent research in Italy highlights persistent gaps between formal participation structures and students’ perceived agency. A national multi-actor survey conducted by the University of Milano-Bicocca in collaboration with ActionAid, involving over 2,000 upper-secondary students, shows that while formal mechanisms of participation exist, more than one third of students perceive their role in school governance as largely symbolic, and only a minority believe that students’ opinions significantly influence school decisions.

This contribution explores the role of Youth Hubs as community learning ecosystems that expand the educational function of schools by connecting formal education, civic engagement and local spaces. Youth hubs are hybrid environments where formal and informal learning intersect, enabling students, educators, civil society organizations and local communities to collaborate in the co-production of knowledge and social innovation.

The analysis draws on ActionAid Italy’s experience in promoting youth participation and community-based educational initiatives, aimed at strengthening the role of schools and local educational communities in addressing educational inequalities and school disengagement. Through capacity-building activities for young people and educators and the activation of community spaces, these initiatives promote civic competences and youth agency beyond the boundaries of formal schooling.

The paper adopts a practice-based case study approach focusing on the experience of Scaro Community, a social café and cultural hub located in a multicultural neighborhood of Agrigento. The initiative was created by a group of young people who decided to return to their hometown to contribute to its social and cultural development. In a territorial context characterized by limited opportunities for youth participation, fragile civic infrastructures and significant youth out-migration, Scaro functions as a community space that promotes education initiatives in collaboration with schools, social innovation and youth-led projects aimed at strengthening local opportunities and civic engagement.

Within this context, youth hub practices connect schools with the broader community through participatory tools such as community laboratories, participatory needs analysis and educational pacts, allowing students to reflect on their local context, articulate collective needs and interact with local institutions. These processes strengthen young people’s sense of belonging and support confidence in the possibility of collective change.

The contribution situates this experience within broader theoretical frameworks on youth participation and democratic education, including models of participation (Hart, 1992; Lundy, 2007), the concept of the school as a learning organisation (Kools & Stoll, 2016), and research on student voice.

Findings suggest that youth hubs can function as local democratic infrastructures, enabling young people to become active agents shaping their communities, promoting community regeneration.

This paper aims to reflect, primarily from a historical perspective, on the path that led to the creation of the Rinnovata school by its founder, Giuseppina Pizzigoni (1870-1947). In this regard, analyzing the process that led to the creation of a method and the construction of a new school building—a space for the concrete implementation of Pizzigoni's pedagogical thinking—we intend to focus on two key aspects (Rossi Cassottana, 1988, 2004).. The first is the establishment of a scientific committee to support the project, composed of key figures in Milanese society at the time. Until now, little has been explored regarding the scientific committee that Giuseppina Pizzigoni established and that supported her in her project to create and experiment with a different teaching approach. The group that supported her included scientists, engineers, writers, and entrepreneurs. Among these, we can at least mention: astronomer Giovanni Celoria, Professor Eugenio Medea, psychologist Zaccaria Treves, poet Giovanni Bertacchi, and industrialists Paravia, Marelli, and Bisleri (Pizzigoni, 2022). This group can be seen as a project team from which a new educational model emerged, embracing its potential for social transformation. Therefore, this group can also be considered, in a certain sense, a social hub that has focused on the importance of school as a place for building knowledge, a driving force for social cohesion, and for developing the abilities of each individual and the community.

The second fundamental aspect is the attention paid to the design of the school building. This project embodies Giuseppina Pizzigoni's pedagogical philosophy, with many of the essential recommendations communicated to Amerigo Belloni, the engineer who built the school following her suggestions (Pizzigoni, 1914). Here too, the school is conceived as a center of great social value, a space in constant communication with the outside world, a permeable place that works to enhance even that which lies outside the school. Inside and outside continually collaborate, thus embodying one of Pizzigoni's fundamental ideas, which in her writings led her to state that "School is the world."

Even today, nearly a century after the construction of the Rinnovata, the idea of ​​a continuous exchange between inside and outside, the vision of a school as a driving force within the neighborhood, a point of reference for the creation of an energetic community, or a place for social exchange, remains a defining characteristic of this school. This paper will offer some concrete examples of contemporary trends (Zuccoli, 2017).