Conference Program

Education research has extensively documented the economic returns of schooling, particularly regarding employment, income, and labour market opportunities (Checchi, 2006; Ballarino et al., 2016; Pensiero et al., 2019). By contrast, less attention has been paid to its non-market returns, especially its contribution to promoting civic and political participation, associational involvement, and democratic orientations (Campbell, 2006; Assirelli, 2014; Sciolla, 2019). In line with the debate on educational poverty, this study interprets educational deprivation not merely as low educational attainment or a deficit in economically valuable skills (Giancola and Salmieri, 2023), but as a constraint on the resources required for active and informed citizenship.

Within this perspective, three main theoretical frameworks are highlighted. The first conceptualises education as a mechanism of intergenerational reproduction of social and cultural inequalities (Bourdieu, 1972), whereby social origin continues to exert a strong influence on access to, persistence in, and success within educational trajectories, contributing to the transmission of both resources and disadvantages across generations. The second concerns the effects of low educational attainment, which extend beyond disadvantaged labour market outcomes (Giancola & Salmieri, 2022) to include the civic and political domains: lower levels of education are associated with weaker participatory skills, lower levels of institutional trust, and less tolerant attitudes toward others. Finally, the third refers to the capability approach (Sen, 1985), which frames education as a resource. The effectiveness of this resource depends on the extent to which educational credentials can be converted into real opportunities for agency.

This study aims to analyse the joint role of social origin and educational attainment in shaping multiple dimensions of civicness, considering social origin both as a factor influencing educational trajectories and as a resource exerting a direct and indirect education-mediated effect on civic participation and orientations. Empirically, the study relies on data from the last four waves (2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and examines the impact of education on selected dimensions of civicness identified by Campbell (2006) and further developed by Assirelli (2014): political engagement, interpersonal and institutional trust, and tolerance towards minorities.

The methodological strategy combines two complementary analytical strategies. First, a compositional descriptive approach explores the interactions between social origin, education, and civicness through Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Cluster Analysis (CA), providing a structured representation of the distribution of civic resources. Second, an exploratory-confirmatory approach based on multivariate linear models estimates the direct and indirect effects of the variables considered, controlling for key sociodemographic characteristics. The findings highlight the pivotal role of education in shaping civic inequalities. While educational attainment strongly shapes patterns of active citizenship, social origin still exerts an independent influence, operating both through educational pathways and directly. These findings underscore the persistence of inequality reproduction mechanisms within the civic sphere.

Educational poverty is not only a matter of access to schooling but also of the quality of knowledge and competences that students acquire (Argentin et al. 2017; Ardeni, 2018; Pensiero, Gancola and Barone, 2019; Giancola and Salmieri, 2023). Historical competency, in particular, encompasses the critical ability to interrogate and evaluate sources, a skill increasingly vital in digital environments saturated with misinformation and low-quality content. Developing students’ capacity to navigate such complex information landscapes is essential for fostering informed citizenship and civic responsibility (Armitage and Guldi, 2016; Pisanty, 2019; Prosperi, 2021).

Despite this, history teaching in many Italian schools rarely covers contemporary topics, often neglecting structured engagement with primary sources and historiographical materials (Talarico, 2023). This pedagogical gap risks perpetuating cultural deprivation and reinforcing patterns of social reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). Addressing it requires not only increasing the instructional time devoted to history, particularly in technical and vocational tracks, but also providing teachers with professional development in source-centered approaches often lacking in their university training (De Bernardi, 2023).

This presentation examines these issues through exploratory research based on a qualitative analysis of final reports from class councils in a sample of Italian upper secondary schools. The data offer insights into how micro-level teaching practices both reflect and contribute to broader social inequalities, and how a stronger emphasis on critical source use could simultaneously enhance historical understanding, civic competencies, and the ability to discern reliable information from misinformation in both offline and online contexts.

The post-apartheid South African Higher Education landscape remains marked by profound inequalities that perpetuate historical patterns of exclusion despite formal democratisation and policy reforms aimed at transformation in pursuit of social justice (Agumba et al., 2023). While access to universities has expanded since 1994, educational attainment continues to reflect deep structural disparities, with Black African students, particularly women from rural and working-class backgrounds, experiencing multiple intersecting layers of marginalisation (Heleta, 2016). Black women navigate a complex matrix of oppression where patriarchal structures intersect with enduring racial hierarchies, creating unique barriers to both entry and success in higher education (Hlatshwayo, 2020). This marginalisation is reinforced by the symbolic violence operating within the education field —the subtle, normalised forms of domination embedded in institutional cultures, curricula, and pedagogical practices that systematically devalue their knowledge systems, languages, and lived experiences while privileging Western-centric, masculinist epistemologies.

Conceptually building upon this, in this paper, we show how sustained experiences of forms of violence - physical, sexual and symbolic - across the home and education field are internalised by the women in our study, and how this positions their conception of the world and their ways of being in it. Our analysis extends Bourdieusian conceptualisations of habitus clivé (Ingram, 2011; 2018; Friedman, 2016) by foregrounding trauma as an embodied, affective experience that leaves a lasting imprint on the habitus. Sustained and multi-generational exposure to physical, sexual, and symbolic violence across home and educational fields is internalised to form lasting perceptions and conceptions of the world. These deeply traumatic experiences can cause habitus rupture and a calling into question of taken-for-granted ways of being. This rupture is particularly pronounced in cases where the multiple fields in which a person lives their life, become misaligned with habitus (Brahic et al., 2025).

The extreme nature of the violence and abuse suffered by the women in our study is recognised in the present, and not dismissed as something that happened in the past when read through the lens of ruptured habitus. It offers a way of acknowledging the violence not as something they have overcome, but as something they have internalised as history, and now embody in their orientation towards their future. Our results discuss the need for targeted support within the South African education context to tackle gender-based violence for children in schools and communities. The results also highlight the need for the Higher Education system to recognise trauma experiences for women from the poorest financial backgrounds, and we suggest that expert support services are needed to promote equity in accessing higher education.

This study seeks to describe the educational situation in at-risk areas of Catania. The main goal is to analyse the presence and role of public institutions and third-sector organizations in preventing school dropout. This work also aims to assess the degree of homogeneity and specificity observed across the monitored areas with regard to active initiatives, existing challenges, and forms of collaboration.

Educational poverty limits children’s right to education and reduces their opportunities to develop the skills necessary to grow and integrate into society. This phenomenon arises from a lack of resources and opportunities within social and territorial contexts and negatively affects minors’ cognitive development. Its consequences include difficulties in learning, comprehension, writing, numeracy, and the ability to cope with everyday problems and practical tasks.

The metropolitan city of Catania shows very high levels of educational poverty: the school dropout rate has reached 26% (Openpolis, 2025). This situation particularly affects minors living in families with low levels of education and in difficult socioeconomic conditions. Many young people interrupt their studies to contribute economically to their families, sometimes becoming involved in informal or illegal activities. Schools play a central role in combating early school leaving, both through their own educational tools and through collaboration with institutions and voluntary organizations operating in the local area. Projects promoted by these actors aim to reduce the risk of dropout and to offer new learning opportunities, thereby fostering pathways out of intergenerational poverty and supporting social mobility.

The research is structured in two phases: I) the selection and mapping of local areas that are experiencing the highest levels of social deprivation, identified through ISTAT data; II) the reconstruction of intervention strategies through interviews and questionnaires administered to schools and voluntary organizations.

Methodologically, the research adopts a mixed-methods approach. It combines analysis of secondary data with qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and questionnaires administered to schools and voluntary organizations, to reconstruct local intervention strategies.

The findings highlight a complex and differentiated phenomenon. Economic, social, and, in some cases, infrastructural difficulties – such as those observed in the district of Librino and San Cristoforo – make efforts to counter educational poverty particularly challenging. Nevertheless, multidisciplinary approaches and shared, project-based work involving multiple stakeholders have proven effective in developing educational pathways that address the specific needs of minors.

This proposal explores how Outdoor Education and Service Learning can represent two effective pedagogical responses to educational poverty in school contexts marked by cultural and economic deprivation. Starting from the assumption that educational poverty does not simply coincide with low academic achievement, but also concerns limited access to meaningful learning opportunities, critical thinking, participation, and cultural resources, the paper presents two case studies of schools that have developed practices aimed at promoting the educational success of every student.

The cases analyzed show how the combination of Outdoor Education and Service Learning can foster more inclusive and participatory learning pathways, highlighting the potential of the school as a democratic space capable of broadening students’ horizons, strengthening their agency, and promoting more equitable access to rich and transformative learning experiences.

The first case study concerns the Benci-Borsi Comprehensive Institute in Livorno, which, through the integration of different methodologies and pedagogical approaches (including Outdoor Education, Service Learning, Slow Education, and Philosophy for Children), has overcome the fragmentation of isolated interventions, fostering instead a process of structural transformation of the school toward a caring, community-oriented identity, with a whole-school approach to well-being. In this perspective, the school can be understood as a genuine educational ecosystem, based on three main elements:

1. an extended interprofessional collaboration, with the school constantly engaged in co-design processes with local community partners;
2. the enhancement of cultural diversity within both the school community and the wider local context;
3. intergenerational practices aimed at creating spaces for encounter, exchange, and dialogue among different generations.

The second case study reports the experience of the Piazzale della Gioventù Comprehensive Institute in Santa Marinella, which has introduced a biophilic curriculum within its school. The biophilic curriculum is a vertical, competency-based framework (structured through activities, practices, and progressive objectives) that prioritizes the development of transversal skills, behaviors, and attitudes (such as managed risk, relationships, and community engagement) rather than focusing solely on disciplinary content. It emphasizes civic responsibility and the affective dimension of learning, with biophilia and Service Learning as shared guiding principles, and integrates Outdoor Education not simply as “teaching outside”, but as the construction of authentic experiences that connect body, emotion, cognition, and relationships with living beings. In this case, the educational response to deprivation is based on the idea that students should not be considered passive recipients of simplified knowledge, but active subjects capable of interpreting reality and contributing to its transformation.

Taken together, the two case studies suggest that Outdoor Education and Service Learning are valuable strategies not because they compensate for disadvantage through simplification, but because they enrich educational pathways through participation, experience, and social meaning. The paper argues that, in contexts of deprivation, addressing educational poverty requires schools to expand access to knowledge rather than reduce it, and to create conditions in which all students can develop critical reflection, responsibility, and agency. From this perspective, the two approaches offer relevant insights for rethinking the democratic mission of schooling and for promoting inclusive and equitable forms of educational success.

Educational poverty is increasingly recognized as a structural phenomenon closely linked to social inequality and unequal distributions of economic and cultural capital. From this perspective, schools may either mitigate or reproduce these inequalities. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of cultural reproduction, this paper examines how different forms of capital shape students’ and teachers’ attitudes toward sociocultural diversity in Croatian upper secondary schools, and how these processes may relate to educational poverty, symbolic violence, and the broader democratic role of education (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Educational poverty is not limited to the absence of basic skills, but also involves restricted access to complex forms of knowledge, critical thinking, and cultural resources that enable active participation in democratic life (Adams & Bell, 2016). When curricula, pedagogical practices, or institutional cultures implicitly privilege dominant cultural capital, students from disadvantaged backgrounds may experience forms of symbolic violence that devalue their cultural resources and reinforce social hierarchies (Olneck, 2000). The study draws on data collected in 2026 through a national questionnaire survey conducted among a representative sample of approximately 2,000 upper secondary school students and 500 teachers across all types of upper secondary education programs in Croatia. The research examines determinants of attitudes toward sociocultural diversity among both groups. Multiple regression analysis will be employed to identify predictors of inclusive or exclusionary attitudes toward diversity. Particular attention will be paid to whether unequal distributions of economic and cultural capital correspond with more negative attitudes toward diversity and with patterns that reproduce symbolic boundaries within the school context (Pedersen, 1996). It is expected that students with lower levels of cultural and economic capital may encounter educational environments that insufficiently recognize their cultural resources, potentially reinforcing experiences associated with educational poverty (Gorski, 2009). Teachers operating within institutional pressures and standardized curricular frameworks may also reproduce dominant cultural norms that unintentionally sustain symbolic inequalities. By connecting educational poverty with Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and symbolic violence, this study contributes to discussions about how schools shape dispositions relevant to democratic participation. If educational systems fail to provide equitable access to rich cultural knowledge and reflexive capacities, they risk limiting the ability of young people to engage critically in democratic processes. The findings therefore highlight the importance of educational policies and pedagogical practices that expand cultural resources, challenge symbolic hierarchies, and strengthen the democratic mission of schooling.