Conference Program

The relationship between religion and civic education represents one of the most fertile—yet problematic—fields of inquiry in contemporary pedagogy. While Law 92/2019 and the recent MIM Guidelines (2024) emphasize the need to cultivate citizens capable of navigating a pluralistic and "onlife" society, the presence of religious phenomena within the school context often oscillates between generative possibilities and profound misunderstandings.

The possibility lies in the potential of religion to serve as a "reservoir of meaning" and an ethical compass. In a democracy understood as a socio-cultural practice, knowledge of religious traditions provides the tools for "critical reflectivity" and the construction of an identity open to alterity. However, this potential frequently clashes with structural misunderstandings:

1. The overlap between civic instruction and confessional indoctrination.
2. The difficulty of mediating between absolute religious values and democratic relativism.
3. Emerging tensions in multicultural classrooms, where the "religious fact" can become a barrier rather than a bridge.

1. With the atypical status of religious teaching in Italy, can the religion teacher teach civic education?

This paper intends to explore how the teaching of religion (or the treatment of religious facts within pluralistic contexts) can integrate with Civic Education methodologies to promote a democratic coexistence that is truly inclusive. If school is "life itself", understanding diverse faiths and value systems becomes a key tool for decoding contemporary social complexity. Through a comparison of educational models, the discussion intends to demonstrate that religious literacy is an essential prerequisite for conscious citizenship, capable of integrating the spiritual dimension into a shared ethical-political horizon.

At its most basic level, democracy signifies “power of the people,” grounded not only in majority rule but also in individual responsibility for the collective good. Beyond its institutional dimension, democracy is understood as a dynamic and evolving social process that continuously negotiates individual freedom, equality, solidarity, and the rule of law (Dahl, 1989; Rohmann, 1999). It functions simultaneously at individual and societal levels, requiring a delicate balance between personal autonomy and belonging to a community (Perotti, 1994). When equality and solidarity compete with individual liberty, the central liberal-democratic question arises: is a sustainable balance between these values possible (Sorensen, 2008)?

Education is crucial in mediating this balance. Democracy depends on the political knowledge, civic awareness, and participatory capacities developed throughout life (Dewey, 1916). Schools and universities therefore represent key arenas where democracy is either enacted as a lived practice or reduced to formal procedures. Inclusion, understood as the meaningful participation of all those affected by decisions (Young, 2002), becomes a defining criterion of democratic quality. Democratic development unfolds across interconnected dimensions—policies, cultures, and practices (Booth & Ainscow, 2002)—which together shape the everyday experience of democracy within institutions.

To reconstruct how these dimensions have been conceptualized across disciplines, we conducted a narrative systematic meta-analysis of more than 200 scientific and professional publications from pedagogy, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history. Through theoretical triangulation and qualitative content analysis, recurring themes, categories, and conceptual patterns were identified. The analysis revealed three dominant conceptual strands of democracy in relation to education: (1) democracy as institutional-legal governance focused on rights, representation, and formal structures; (2) democracy as participatory culture emphasizing voice, dialogue, shared responsibility, and relational power; and (3) democracy as transformative practice linked to moral responsibility, social justice, and active citizenship. These strands, often treated separately within disciplinary boundaries, were integrated into an analytically unified triangulated model conceptualized as “democracy-as-education.” This model understands democracy as simultaneously structural, cultural, and pedagogical.

Applying this triangulated model to the Croatian post-socialist context reveals a significant tension. While democratic institutions and legal frameworks have been formally established since the 1990s, centralized governance structures and hierarchical administrative traditions persist. Findings of previous research indicate that democracy is predominantly interpreted as a legal-institutional arrangement rather than as a participatory culture (Pažur, 2019). Student voice, shared governance, and local community influence remain limited, suggesting that democratic culture and practice lag behind formal policy commitments. The imbalance between structural democratization and cultural-pedagogical transformation reflects historically rooted asymmetries of power typical of post-socialist societies.

This paper presents first-year findings from the Croatian research project “Gordian Hub of Croatian Democracy: How to Untangle It?” (DEMOhub). By situating empirical observations within a theoretically triangulated and historically grounded framework, the study demonstrates how democracy–education relations unfold across four interconnected levels: national policy, local governance, educational institutions, and individual actors.

By bridging theory and empirical analysis, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of how democracy can move from formal adoption toward lived practice in centralized, post-socialist contexts.

In Italy, access to full civic belonging remains deeply shaped by the citizenship regime based on jus sanguinis (Law 91/1992). As a result, many young people who were born in Italy or arrived at a young age remain legally classified as foreigners, profoundly shaping their material relationship to rights, recognition, and belonging. These dynamics are mirrored within the school system itself, where students without Italian citizenship are addressed as future members of the Italian community and socialised into the values and responsibilities associated with civic participation, while remaining excluded from the rights that full legal status entails. The classroom thus becomes a paradoxical space in which young people are symbolically socialised into full membership while empirically positioned as outsiders.

Literature has shown how national identity has been historically shaped through racialised distinctions, including colonial imaginaries and North-South divides (Giuliani & Lombardi-Diop, 2013). When these historical processes remain marginal within educational narratives, students are encouraged to develop civic competencies without fully confronting the histories that structure contemporary inequalities and exclusions. Consequently, schools actively reproduce a distinction between “unmarked” Italians and “foreigners,” categories that frequently map onto racialised hierarchies of belonging.

This presentation examines how racialised Italianness, understood as an analytical assemblage that embeds cultural and political horizons, is produced and contested at the intersection of history and civic education in Italian upper-secondary schools. These tensions reveal an epistemic gap between the two domains: while civic education aims to promote democratic participation and inclusive belonging, history curricula often reproduce narratives of national innocence and cultural homogeneity that leave little room to critically address racialisation and the historical construction of Italianness. The paper explores how civic education laboratories and participatory learning activities can help address this gap, fostering more critical and equitable forms of civic formation for students.

Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to discourse (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014; Foucault, 1972), Hall’s (2017) conceptualisation of race as a floating signifier, and assemblage thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the study approaches Italianness as a contingent formation continuously produced and negotiated through educational knowledge and practice. To investigate how these processes operate within schooling, the research combines critical discourse analysis of ministerial curricula and directives with ethnographic fieldwork in upper-secondary schools in Turin.

Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of participatory workshops conducted with fourth- and fifth-year students, using methods such as problem-based learning and scenario-based discussions. The workshops invited students to critically engage with questions of belonging and historical responsibility. By bringing historical narratives into dialogue with civic questions of equity and participation, these activities sought to address the epistemic gap between history and civic education identified earlier. Preliminary findings suggest that dominant narratives of national innocence and normative whiteness produce epistemic silences around colonial histories and contemporary racial hierarchies. At the same time, moments of hesitation, discomfort, and debate reveal the pedagogical potential of civic education as a space where taken-for-granted narratives of national identity can be critically examined and reimagined.

Educating for choice represents a central pillar of digital citizenship, defined by the Guidelines for the Teaching of Civic Education as an individual's capacity to interact consciously and responsibly with technological developments (Ministero dell’Istruzione e del Merito [MIM], 2024). In a context marked by the "fragmented society" and infobesity, the mere availability of a vast amount of data does not guarantee more rational decisions; on the contrary, it often induces users to passively follow the initial options proposed by algorithms without undertaking a deeper critical analysis (Ariemma & Sarracino, 2025).

In terms of "decision science", educating for choice means stimulating the activation of System 2 -slow, deliberate, and analytical thinking - in order to oversee the rapid and often biased intuitions of System 1, which operates automatically and with minimal effort (Kahneman, 2011).

Decisions are, in fact, often profoundly influenced by emotions and non-objective parameters such as stereotypes and preconceptions, which act as powerful cognitive "shortcuts" (Berthoz, 2004). The uncontrolled expansion of the web and the proliferation of digital services have generated an information overload that, paradoxically, hinders decision-making processes: an excess of options causes bewilderment, unease, and dissatisfaction (Ricci et al., 2011). Consequently, we are inclined to delegate our choices to recommender algorithms, "black boxes" that, by limiting exposure to divergent perspectives and reinforcing pre-existing biases, allow us to reach a choice quickly and with satisfaction (Ariemma & Sarracino, 2025; MIM, 2024).

Was it, however, a true choice? To respond to these challenges, schools must adopt a transversal perspective and laboratory-based methodologies that promote experiential learning and the ability to integrate and re-elaborate digital content in a personal way (MIM, 2024). The teaching of civic education must therefore evolve towards an "Algorithmic Pedagogy" (or AI Literacy), which equips students with the critical tools to evaluate the reliability of sources and understand the principles regulating data flow (Pasta & Rivoltella, 2022). Educating for choice means transforming students from passive consumers into responsible protagonists, capable of exercising their decisional autonomy through the critical recomposition of knowledge and the activation of deliberate thought.

This contribution illustrates the evolution and pedagogical aims of an educational path focused on the "choice" enacted with students of the Degree Course in Educational Sciences. This path starts from the construct of "designing" understood as a pedagogical device to transform interaction with technology from passive consumption into an act of intentional and critical construction. Teaching how to design thus becomes an exercise in active digital citizenship, as it requires students to evaluate the reliability of sources, manage their own identity, and understand the ethical implications of their own productions. Through design, choice is no longer an option endured among alternatives suggested by an algorithm; instead, it becomes the critical synthesis of a process of knowledge recomposition, in which the student learns to govern information flows rather than being passively contaminated by them.

Between April and October 2025, the Permanent Observatory on Civic Education ‘Prof. Franco Anelli’, created through collaboration between the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation of Italy Onlus Association, conducted the first quantitative survey at the national level to observe the current situation in relation to organisational and teaching methodology, human rights issues, student participation, family and community involvement, and teacher training processes. The survey involved more than 4,000 teachers from nursery, primary and lower secondary schools to upper secondary schools, distributed throughout educational institutions across the country. This contribution aims to shed light on the section of the research that specifically analysed the role of students and to share the findings on the participation of children and adolescents, the issues and methodologies they favour, the learning paths they develop, and the ways in which they develop civic awareness, exercise citizenship, and promote human rights. In light of the data and related analyses, meaningful directions, significant experiences and desirable changes are outlined.

In contemporary pedagogical debate, democracy can no longer be conceived solely as an institutional form or as a set of normative devices; rather, it must be understood as a daily cultural practice, as a relational experience that takes shape within the concrete contexts of social life. In the perspective of John Dewey, democracy was already conceived as a “mode of associated living,” while in Jürgen Habermas it assumed the features of a public sphere grounded in communicative action and in the possibility of shared rational deliberation. Today, however, this theoretical horizon is undergoing a profound transformation: the progressive integration between the analogical and the digital dimensions radically reshapes the spaces, times, and modalities of democratic experience.

Drawing on Luciano Floridi’s view, according to which the distinction between online and offline now appears conceptually outdated, this contribution proposes interpreting contemporary citizenship as an “onlife” experience embedded within the infosphere; that is, not a parallel or secondary space with respect to social reality, but a structural dimension within which identities, relationships, and forms of participation are redefined. Citizenship thus assumes an informational configuration and is exercised through data, platforms, algorithms, dynamics of visibility, and processes of technological mediation that affect the construction of consensus and the organization of dissent.

In light of this transformation, the teaching of Civic Education (Law 92/2019 and the Ministerial Guidelines) must be reconsidered beyond a predominantly content-based approach. The risk of an overly traditional perspective is that it fails to grasp the actual processes through which public opinion is formed and participation is exercised today. Phenomena such as disinformation, digital polarization, and algorithmic profiling cannot be regarded as marginal to the education of citizens; on the contrary, they represent sensitive arenas in which the quality of democracy is at stake.

Three main lines of development are therefore proposed. First, the promotion of critical competences capable of questioning sources, understanding dynamics of manipulation, and being aware of mechanisms of algorithmic amplification. Second, a careful analysis of new forms of digital participation, balancing the expansion of the public sphere with the risks of superficial or merely performative engagement. Third, the need for algorithmic awareness enabling individuals to understand how technological architectures shape civic experience.

From this perspective, the school emerges not merely as a place for instruction about digital citizenship, but as a laboratory in which democracy is effectively inhabited and practiced, including within the hybrid environments that characterize contemporary society. Educating for citizenship today therefore means educating individuals to inhabit the infosphere responsibly, so that democracy does not shrink to a set of formal procedures, but becomes a concrete experience of conscious participation and shared community responsibility.