Conference Program

In the contemporary educational landscape, neurodiversity is increasingly recognized not as a set of deficits to be cured, but as the natural variation in how human beings think, feel, move, perceive, and communicate. This paradigm shift demands that future educators move beyond a purely diagnostic lens toward a social justice perspective that values cognitive differences.

This contribution explores how undergraduate students in Education Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Ferrara, as well as graduate students at the University of Bologna, perceive and internalize neurodiversity. Viewing neurodiversity as a broad spectrum of human communication and thought, we aim to reveal the core attitudes that influence how future educators will practice inclusion in their professional practice. To capture the essence of these perceptions, this study employs a phenomenological methodology, focusing on participants’ lived experiences. Phenomenology allows us to move past abstract theories and delve into the subjective meanings students assign to their encounters with neurodiversity.

The research design is structured in two distinct phases:

1. Individual Reflection: students are first asked to engage in an introspective exercise, documenting personal encounters with neurodiversity in school, family, or professional settings. They are encouraged to record significant moments, whether positive or challenging.
2. Collaborative Storytelling: participants then form small groups to share their reflections and co-construct a narrative artifact (a story, presentation, or multimedia product). These stories, which may be real, imagined, or a hybrid of both, serve as collective representations of what they deem essential to communicate about neurodiversity from their future educator standpoint.

The resulting artifacts are analyzed using thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns of meaning, metaphors, and tensions that characterize the students' understanding of diverse cognitive profiles.

The primary goal of this research is to unearth the implicit perceptions of future educators regarding neurodiversity. We hope to achieve the following outcomes:

1. Understanding student perspectives: we want to see whether students still view neurodiversity as a medical problem to be solved or as a natural human difference to be valued. We also aim to understand the emotions—such as anxiety, empathy, or confidence—that arise when they face these differences.
2. Improving professional training: by identifying where students feel confused or harbor unconscious biases, we can design better university courses. This will help us provide future educators with the specific tools and support they need to work effectively in inclusive environments.
3. Enhancing reflective practice: demonstrate how narrative and phenomenological tools can be integrated into university curricula to foster self-awareness and ethical responsibility.

Ultimately, this study seeks to inform the design of transformative training programs. By analyzing the stories students tell, we can better prepare them to build educational environments where neurodivergent individuals are not just "included," but are truly understood and valued for their unique ways of being in the world.

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), now massively present across various sectors of our society, raises concerns of various kinds. A close examination of current educational research regarding teaching-learning processes in relation to GenAI reveals apprehensive discussions about cognitive diminishment (Fasoli et al., 2025; Kosmyna et al., 2025) and the compromise of individual agency. This occurs in contexts where algorithmic efficiency overshadows individual talents, rendering subjects "neuro-inferior" when compared to the capacity of prominent large language models to process data, identify recurring patterns, and provide formally adequate answers to complex questions. Furthermore, considering the pervasiveness and design features of these "enunciation-producing machines" (Mackenzie, 2017), individual autonomy could effectively become a "collateral victim," leading to increased standardization and, for neurodivergent individuals, greater social exclusion.

However, this perspective risks obscuring the emancipatory potential of GenAI for neurodivergent subjects. This contribution explores how GenAI, if integrated within an ethical and transparent framework and mediated by good pedagogical principles, can transform from a threat into an essential cognitive prosthesis for those who have historically encountered barriers in developing their academic (among others) agency. Through the concept of "artificial agency" (Floridi, 2025), a pedagogy is proposed that does not chase algorithmic performance, but instead values the "slowness of the human gesture" as a space for empowerment. This approach aims to prevent social exclusion and guarantee the right to personalized learning, driven by individual needs and mediated by GenAI. In this way, a genuine protection of individual specificity could be ensured through the lens of social justice, leveraging the high potential of GenAI systems in a profoundly democratic sense

This panel explores the intersection of neurodiversity and urban design, moving beyond traditional accessibility toward the innovative concept of the "Autistic City." Drawing on the framework of "Neurotribes" and the emerging "Neurosphere," the session examines how urban environments can be reimagined to accommodate diverse sensory profiles and cognitive patterns. Modern cities are predominantly designed for "neurotypical" standards, often resulting in sensory overload, unpredictable environments, and rigid social expectations that marginalize neurodivergent individuals.
This panel argues that integrating neurodivergent culture into urban planning—focusing on sensory regulation, "soft" social interfaces, and predictable spatial hierarchies—does not merely benefit autistic citizens but creates a more livable, resilient city for all. We will discuss how the "Neurosphere" acts as both a digital and physical layer of support, fostering community agency and radical inclusion. By shifting the paradigm from "pathology" to "human variation," we aim to define new interdisciplinary guidelines for the "Right to the City." Key topics include the creation of urban decompression zones, the reduction of sensory friction in public infrastructure, and the role of inclusive housing. The panel brings together urban planners, sociologists, and advocates to foster a dialogue that celebrates cognitive plurality as a cornerstone of future sustainable cities.

This paper presents the outcomes of an inclusive educational project implemented in a fourth-grade primary school classroom, aimed at fostering the full participation of a pupil with autism spectrum disorder, Level 3 (DSM-5). The project frames communicative accessibility as a prerequisite for equity and as a driver for social justice in school settings: ensuring that each learner has real—not merely formal—opportunities to be present, understand, express themselves, influence classroom activities, and feel a sense of belonging. From this perspective, social justice does not coincide with the “integration” of an individual student; rather, it entails transforming the classroom’s implicit rules—such as timing, language practices, assessment, and participation structures—which often privilege those who communicate and learn according to normative standards.

The intervention integrated a cooperative language workshop (Johnson & Johnson, 1998) with the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC; Cafiero, 2009), in line with principles of inclusive teaching (Cottini, 2018; Sandri, 2015), a socio-constructivist framework (Vygotsky, 2001), and the co-evolution paradigm (Canevaro, 2008; Sandri, 2019). A co-evolutionary lens conceptualizes neurodiversity as a dynamic relationship between individual and context: rather than intervening on a “deficit,” the approach redesigns environments, mediations, and interactions so that difference does not generate exclusion. In terms of social justice, this shifts the focus from individual adaptation to the collective responsibility of the school community to remove barriers and redistribute opportunities for learning and recognition. Operationally, the programme included narrative and meaning-making activities in small groups, with cooperative roles, shared communicative routines, and AAC supports (symbols, communication boards, scripts, guided choices) to facilitate comprehension, expression, and turn-taking. The cooperative dimension fostered peers’ shared responsibility, countering dynamics in which support is delegated exclusively to the teaching assistant and promoting participation that is not “assisted” but legitimized within ordinary classroom practices. AAC functioned as a tool for the democratization of communication: by making instructions, exchanges, and productions accessible, it expanded pupils’ opportunities to take the floor (including through non-verbal modalities) and to be heard.

The outcomes indicate a gradual increase in the pupil’s communicative and relational initiatives, greater continuity in interactions with classmates, and improved quality of participation. In parallel, peers developed skills in listening, mediation, and the recognition of multiple forms of communication. Overall, the experience highlights how accessibility diapositives and co-evolutionary practices can operate as everyday actions of social justice: reducing participation inequalities, preventing marginalization, and building belonging through reciprocal learning.

The project “A Door to Welcome”, carried out in first-year lower secondary school class, originated from the students’ desire to facilitate the inclusion of a classmate with Autism Spectrum Disorder, R., who was unable to cross the classroom door and attended lessons alone in the adjacent room (Mostafa, 2008; Bogdashina, 2021).

This situation of self-isolation prompted his classmates to reflect on how to welcome him: for them, it represented exclusion and inequality (Booth&Ainscow, 2014; Demo, 2015; d’Alonzo, 2018; Cottini, 2019, 2025) and injustice. The art teacher, urged by R.’s classmates, discovered that he meticulously drew subway station signs, an interest that fascinated him, and developed with the students the project “A Door to Welcome”.

The project is grounded in the principles of inclusive education (Cottini, 2018; Sandri, 2019), cooperative learning (Dishon&O’Leary, 1984; Dunn&Dunn, 1978), differentiated classroom (Tomlinson, 1999, 2001, d’Alonzo, 2016) and in key concepts (Marcarini, 2016): coevolution (Canevaro, 2008; Sandri, 2019), affordance (Gibson, [1979], 1999), semantotopic approach (Franceschini, 1995), legibility (Lynch, 1960; Kaplan, S., 1987), integrative framework (Zanelli, 1986), and world-environment relationship (Mustacchi, 2002), within a perspective of equity and democracy.

The project have two phases. The first starting from reflections on the symbolic function of the “door” (Biedermann, 2004), sliding doors were built from recycled materials and installed in the classroom, creating an environment similar to a subway carriage (Hall, 1969; Kaplan, S., 1987; Mura, 2011; Gaines et al., 2018). Through this mediation, R. gradually became familiar with the classroom space until, in the second year, he definitively entered the classroom and participated in school activities with his peers.

The following year, the students asked to continue the project by adding a new symbolic element, “The Support,” namely the handhold ring to grab for safety.

This second phase aimed to foster reflection on personal potential with particular attention to an equity-oriented perspective (Sen, 1982) within an inclusive framework that means “embracing an ethic of justice” (Sandri, 2019, p. 109), so students may contribute to helping, involving, and including others by focusing on the person and their specific characteristics (Cottini, 2025), in order to recognize and understand their own developmental process in which neurodiversity could become both a resource and a strength and also an opportunity to understand that each of them is different and that everyone must have the same opportunities according to a democratic vision

Each student, including R., reflected on their own character considering how they could support other people. All created a ring on which they wrote the type of support they could offer.

Welcoming R. into the classroom by finding an appropriate strategy fostered a transformation in all students, as each learned to recognize neurodiversity and to accept the characteristics and ways of functioning of every individual within a vision of reciprocity aimed at developing a democratic relational approach. It offered everyone to enrich their learning within a friendly micro-context of coevolutionary respect (Sandri, 2019), to develop a culture of differences and citizenship within a welcoming environment for all (Cottini, 2025).

In current debates on neurodiversity, education, and social justice, inclusion is increasingly understood not as a set of compensatory measures aimed at “fixing” individuals, but as the transformative capacity of educational and social environments to welcome difference, enable meaningful participation, and make rights and dignity concrete in everyday life. From this perspective, families’ viewpoints are a central source of knowledge: parents witness how opportunities and barriers are continuously produced through the interaction of schools, services, informal networks, and local communities, shaping learning trajectories, belonging, recognition, and overall quality of life. This framing resonates with the “Pedagogy of Parents”, which values families’ experiential knowledge and educational competence, and acknowledges their role as active interlocutors in the relationship with institutions (Tortello & Pavone, 1999).

This paper presents a mixed‑methods study conducted in Italy on parents’ lived experiences and representations of their children’s school and social inclusion in the context of neurodivergence, with Down syndrome as the most frequently encountered condition (Dal Molin & Bettale, 2005). The study aims to: describe how families define and assess “real” inclusion by distinguishing between attendance, active participation, and recognition; identify organisational, relational, and instructional factors that support or hinder full participation at school and in social life; and examine sport and extracurricular activities as educational settings connected to well‑being, autonomy, and citizenship, and as potential bridges between school inclusion and broader social inclusion (Contardi, 2016).

The research adopts a mixed‑methods design. The quantitative component is based on approximately 300 original questionnaires completed by parents of children and young people aged 3 to 20. The questionnaire covers five areas: background information on the person with disability and the family; relationships and social inclusion at school; the educational pathway and inclusive educational practices; sport and extracurricular activities; and an open final section for additional comments and recommendations. The qualitative component consists of 20 in‑depth interviews with parents, aimed at reconstructing both parents’ and children’s pathways and recurring turning points in family experience, including: the “first communication” of the diagnosis/condition, relationships with schools and the construction of educational alliances, future-oriented concerns regarding social and employment inclusion, leisure time as a space for sociality, well‑being, and autonomy development, and relationships with institutions—across rights, bureaucracy, and recognition.

Integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence allows the study to connect patterns emerging from the questionnaires with the explanations and meanings articulated in parents’ narratives. In particular, parents’ accounts highlight a crucial distinction between inclusion as mere attendance and inclusion as full participation: being physically present in the classroom does not automatically translate into being recognised, actively engaged, and supported in building meaningful relationships (Moletto & Zucchi, 2013). The “Pedagogy of Parents” lens further supports an interpretation of these accounts as situated educational competence: parents bring not only needs and requests, but also grounded interpretations, strategies for fostering autonomy, and everyday mediation practices that negotiate expectations, institutional constraints, and what local contexts concretely make possible.

In the contemporary debate on neurodiversity (Singer, 2016; den Houting, 2019), neurocognitive differences are framed either as deficits requiring compensation or as expressions of inherent human variability, with distinct implications for educational planning (Chapman, 2023). Within this framework, this contribution reports findings from an exploratory study examining university students’ attitudes toward AI in educational interventions (Holmes, Bialik, & Fadel, 2019) for people with disabilities, using neurodiversity as an interpretative lens to analyse emerging conceptions.

The study was designed as an attitude survey using a direct technique and a pre-experimental design. Data were collected through a two-part questionnaire (35 open and closed questions), interspersed with a video stimulus illustrating the use of AI to support communication for people with profound and multiple intellectual disabilities (PIMD). Neurodiversity served as an analytical tool to distinguish deficit-oriented representations from those framing difference as human variability, while also revealing tensions within this distinction (Clouder et al., 2020; OECD, 2017, Quigley & Gallagher, 2025; Ellis, Kirby, & Osborne, 2025).

The sample included 342 Education Sciences students at the University of Ferrara, predominantly female (95.3%), with over half already working in educational settings. Data were analysed through qualitative thematic analysis, following a recursive deductive–inductive process aligned with the reflexive approach (Braun & Clarke, 2021) and supported by MAXQDA.

Results indicate a favourable stance toward AI as a tool to enhance communication, personalisation, and inclusion. Students emphasised the educational relationship and empathy, alongside ethical concerns such as privacy, technological dependence, and replacement of human roles. However, interpreted through neurodiversity, responses reveal a predominantly assistive-compensatory configuration. Neurocognitive difference is represented as a condition requiring support rather than as natural variability or an epistemic resource reshaping educational contexts.

This outcome must be considered in relation to the empirical device adopted. The video presented an extreme case of PIMD, eliciting representations centred on support needs and testing the applicability of neurodiversity in situations of severely compromised functioning. The study thus exposes a theoretical tension concerning the extent to which neurodiversity can operate as an interpretative framework in such contexts without obscuring the dimension of need (Jaarsma & Welin, 2012).

This tension frames how far the findings align with a transformative understanding of neurodiversity. Compatibility appears uneven: while value-based elements (rights, dignity, equal opportunities) are well established, ontological and epistemological dimensions remain limited. Conceptions prioritise individual adaptation over contextual reconfiguration. The video stimulus produced an emotional-legitimising effect, reinforcing openness to AI without substantial conceptual restructuring.

These findings are discussed in light of tensions within neurodiversity and in relation to proposals for a pedagogy of neurodiversity (Cadavero & Salerni, 2022; Cadavero et al., 2024). The study highlights the need to equip future educators with theoretical tools to distinguish compensatory from transformative approaches. Interpretative caution is required: direct techniques may encourage socially desirable responses; the pre-experimental design limits causal inference; and the analysis remains interpretative. Overall, while students show a strong ethical commitment to inclusion, further theoretical development is needed to critically integrate neurodiversity into debates on technology and education.

Drawing on neurodiversity perspectives, the study reframes the cognitive profile of the music student not as a deficit to be addressed, but as an epistemic resource that reveals the limits of narrow competence models. From a social justice standpoint, inclusion requires more than individual accommodations; it demands a redefinition of what counts as legitimate musical knowledge. Recognising multiple ways of knowing and making music enables more democratic and equitable learning environments in which different cognitive styles are not merely supported, but valued.

In many formal music education settings, the ability to accurately read and interpret written notation is widely treated as a primary sign of musical competence. Students are often evaluated on how quickly and precisely they translate a score into sound, and such criteria shape how progress and talent are recognised (Dahl, 2009; Kivijärvi & Väkevä, 2020). However, musical literacy goes beyond the ability to read musical notation to encompass a range of skills and knowledge, from understanding and interpretation to listening and cultural awareness, enabling individuals to make music in a thoughtful and informed way (Mills & McPherson, 2006). For this reason, when competence is measured mainly through the speed and accuracy with which notation is decoded, a complex set of abilities is reduced to a single skill. This approach reflects a narrowing of the concept rather than a necessary condition for being musically literate.

Within this framework, not all learners have an equal footing. In particular, the cognitive demands of reading music scores, which include rapid symbol processing, rhythmic organization, and the integration of visual and motor systems, may pose a challenge for students with a specific learning disorder (SLD) (Oglethorpe, 2002). When these skills are used as the main assessment criteria, students whose cognitive processing differs from this model risk being perceived as less competent, even if they demonstrate strong musical perception, expressive depth, attentive listening, or refined bodily coordination.

Therefore, the question that arises is not only how students perform, but also how competence is defined and which forms of musical knowledge are considered legitimate. Against this background, this paper uses a case study of a violin student with dyslexia to examine how alternative pathways to musical understanding can become visible when pedagogical priorities shift. When teaching moved away from a primary emphasis on rapid notation decoding and towards embodied practices — focusing on posture, movement coordination, listening, and sound production — different forms of musical knowledge emerged. The student’s development shows how musical understanding can be constructed through sensory, motor, and relational processes, rather than primarily through symbolic interpretation.