Conference Program

International and national educational policies recognize teacher education as a strategic lever for promoting inclusive schooling. Nevertheless, a substantial body of research highlights a persistent gap between the normative discourse on inclusion and everyday educational practices. This gap can be attributed, at least in part, to the endurance of social representations of disability grounded in deficit-oriented and ableist paradigms, which continue to implicitly shape teachers’ attitudes, educational expectations, and instructional choices. This contribution offers a theoretical and methodological reflection on teacher education as a privileged space for the deconstruction of perceptions and attitudes toward disability, positioning professional reflexivity as a central formative device. Drawing on the theoretical framework of social representations and the concept of professional habitus, the paper examines how tacit cognitive schemes, doxic beliefs, and embodied dispositions orient educational action – often below the threshold of conscious awareness – thereby reproducing practices that contradict the principles of inclusive education. From this perspective, teacher education cannot be reduced to the transmission of technical or methodological competencies, but must be understood as a transformative process aimed at critically interrogating the dominant educational imaginary surrounding disability. Particular attention is devoted to reflexivity as a practice capable of making visible the cultural assumptions underpinning teaching practices and of activating processes of critical reworking of professional experience. The contribution discusses a range of reflective training devices – including the narration of practices, professional and autobiographical writing, the analysis of instructional planning, professional journaling, and dialogic peer exchange – conceived as tools for bringing to the surface stereotypes, automatisms, and implicit attitudes toward disability. These devices enable teachers to critically examine the distance between inclusive discourses and enacted practices, fostering a transformation of professional habitus toward greater awareness, critical engagement, and inclusivity. The aim of the paper is to offer theoretical and methodological insights for rethinking teacher education as an ethical and political practice, capable of supporting the development of a reflective teaching professionalism oriented toward educational justice and the construction of genuinely inclusive educational practices.

This contribution presents and discusses a Philosophy for Children (P4C) project implemented in a primary school within a comprehensive institute in Rome. The project is designed as an innovative and inclusive pedagogical practice aimed at fostering democratic schooling through dialogical inquiry, critical thinking, and participatory learning processes. In a contemporary educational context increasingly shaped by standardization and homogenizing curricular models, the teaching of philosophy is conceived as a form of pedagogical resistance, capable of preserving plurality, subjectivity, and critical reflection within schooling.

Grounded in the theoretical framework of Philosophy for Children, as developed by Matthew Lipman and later expanded by international scholarship, the project is carried out over one academic year with students aged 8–10. Philosophical inquiry sessions are integrated into the regular curriculum and structured around the Community of Inquiry model. Through shared reading of philosophical stimuli, collective question generation, and dialogical discussion, pupils are encouraged to express their viewpoints, listen to others, justify their reasoning, and collaboratively construct meaning. This process supports inclusive participation by valuing diverse cognitive styles, linguistic repertoires, and lived experiences, thus challenging normative and deficit-based conceptions of learning.

The project explicitly addresses the democratic and inclusive dimension of schooling by positioning students as active participants in knowledge construction. Classroom dialogue functions as a micro-democratic space in which rules of discussion are co-constructed, authority is shared, and differences are recognized as epistemic resources. In this sense, philosophical inquiry counters the logic of standardization by resisting the reduction of students to measurable performances and instead affirming their voices as singular, relational, and socially situated.

Curriculum teachers work alongside trained P4C experts, who co-facilitate inquiry sessions, model philosophical dialogue, and support teachers in adopting a facilitative rather than transmissive role. This collaborative approach contributes to the creation of an inclusive learning environment in which all students, including those at risk of marginalization, can participate meaningfully. By fostering critical questioning and reflexivity, P4C offers children conceptual tools to recognize and challenge stereotypes, implicit biases, and taken-for-granted assumptions that often underpin processes of exclusion, oppression, and discrimination.

Qualitative data are collected through classroom observations, students’ reflective journals, audio recordings of discussions, and teachers’ field notes. The analysis highlights developments in students’ argumentative skills, dialogical dispositions, and openness to plural perspectives. Moreover, the P4C approach contributes to reshaping classroom relationships, promoting mutual respect, cooperation, and a stronger sense of belonging within the learning community.

This paper argues that Philosophy for Children represents a powerful pedagogical innovation capable of strengthening democratic and inclusive practices in primary education. By embedding philosophical inquiry into everyday school life and by proposing the project on a yearly basis, the initiative demonstrates how democratic schooling can be cultivated from an early age, not merely as a curricular topic but as a lived educational experience. The contribution concludes by reflecting on the implications for teacher education and on the sustainability of P4C practices within comprehensive school systems committed to resisting standardization and promoting social justice through education.

In un panorama educativo italiano che storicamente si dichiara inclusivo, le politiche scolastiche recenti sembrano orientarsi verso una "pseudo-inclusione" che maschera—sotto la retorica del talento e della personalizzazione—un ritorno a logiche neoliberiste e abiliste. Questo contributo propone un'analisi critica delle "Linee Guida Nazionali 2025" (Indicazioni Nazionali 2025) attraverso la lente degli Studi Critici sulla Disabilità (CDS), con l'obiettivo di smascherare come il sistema educativo continui a funzionare come strumento di normalizzazione.

The analysis focuses on three main problematic nodes identified within the ministerial text. First, the construction of the notion of "talent" is examined: although presented as a universal potential, it is framed as the "active and situated expression of cognitive resources," effectively establishing a value parameter based on performance. This approach transforms merit into an "ableist realm" where success is the individual's responsibility, marginalizing anyone with non-conforming functioning or divergent processing speeds.
Secondly, the study analyzes the persistence of normative bodily and cognitive standards in the areas of physical and digital competence. The pursuit of "precision," "finalization of movement," and "speed" in developmental milestones reflects a view of the body and mind as machines to be optimized, ignoring disability epistemologies and the concepts of interdependence.
Finally, the intervention highlights how the language of "deficit compensation," despite attempts at terminological updates, maintains a firm medical and individual perspective on disability. This paradigm prevents genuine cultural transformation, reducing inclusion to a technical management of "diversity" so as not to disturb the pace of the "normal" classroom.
The objective of this presentation is to demonstrate how these guidelines, by promoting rigid autonomy and an exclusionary meritocracy, act as disabling practices. In conclusion, trajectories of resistance based on critical pedagogy and disability justice will be proposed, shifting the focus from "subject performance" to the "transformation of contexts" for an authentically constitutional and equitable educational system.

The Italian school system was a pioneer in the deinstitutionalization of education, being the first to welcome all students into the regular education system and establishing inclusive education as its current guiding principle. However, the practical implementation of this principle remains fraught with challenges. Within the Italian academic landscape, research informed by the Disability Studies perspective has exposed systemic flaws in the inclusive process, which often culminate in practices of exclusion and discrimination. Specifically, since the early 2000s, processes of micro-exclusion have been brought to light.

In line with this theoretical framework, an observational study was conducted across two primary schools in the Tuscany region to identify contemporary phenomena of micro-exclusion within school contexts. The findings revealed that such practices persist across seven key domains: language, physical spaces, temporal organization, interpersonal relationships, instructional design, educational provision, and assessment.

This contribution aims to analyze these phenomena through the lens of Critical Disability Studies to understand which elements, typical of ableism, drive their manifestation.

From the analysis of the observed phenomena, it emerges that the school system remains deeply rooted in an ableist paradigm. Firstly, there is a noticeable “pollution” of language, resulting from both implicit and explicit categorization processes that reflect a marked prevalence of the individual-medical model. Secondly, the constant reference to the norm triggers separation at multiple levels. Processes of instructional design and assessment, alongside the organization of educational provision, all based on the concept of homogeneity and the ideal of the “average student”, render those who do not fit this canon victims of normalization, adaptation, compensation, and simplification, at best. At worst, these students face exclusion from learning and socialization, leading to the creation of parallel tracks delegated solely to the support teacher. Furthermore, this phenomenon of delegation is reflected in the interpersonal dynamics within the class group. Finally, the normative organization of space induces push-out phenomena toward environments constructed for specific categories of students based on their impairment, thereby shifting the focus back onto the individual rather than the context.

The school has struggled to embrace the challenge of being transformed by diversity, which continues to be interpreted as a deviation from a norm, a condition to be reduced to facilitate assimilation. The necessary shift toward inclusive education, understood as a radical transformation of the system, has yet to be fully realized. It is, therefore, essential to reclaim an authentically inclusive perspective: one that shifts the focus away from the “non-normative” student to examine the disabling context and deconstruct the dominant ableist ideologies from which exclusionary and discriminatory practices derive.

The research is based on a year of ethnographic observation of three groups of students at different stages of their education in four schools in Bologna: two second-year classes in lower secondary school; two classes in the first two years of upper secondary school; and a group of young adult activists with disabilities. Integrating socio-anthropological literature and Disability Studies, the study focused on how guidance practices contribute to the construction of a representation of disabled people by teachers and help to propose to young disabled people an identity to internalise and an educational trajectory to adhere to, producing a looping effect specific to the school field. These representations correspond to imaginaries and educational opportunities that privilege medical-functional needs over personal aspirations. Secondly, through a socio-material analysis of guidance practices, it observed in action some guidance devices - teaching materials, “consigli di orientamento” and differentiation of the PEI - which contribute to the over-representation of students with disabilities in technical and vocational education. This streaming is facilitated by a process of “platformisation” of guidance (Unica) which centralises the collection of information and reduces the complex educational process of choice to a predetermined future to adhere to. The school life stories of the group of young adult activists have served as a tool to shed light on the material and cultural barriers in the students' experiences and their strategies of resistance and rebellion against the destinies offered to them. Can the human being be a project? A project of whom and for whom?