Conference Program

In this paper, I draw from my research exploring how adolescents in Italy make sense of their relationships with teachers to discuss the potentialities and challenges of engaging with students reflexively to gain a deeper understanding of school experiences.

I conceive student-teacher relationships (STR) as a dynamic, affective and dialogic relationship between individual students and teachers emerging from their reciprocal (re)actions within the physical, social and ideological setting of the school (Cook-Sather, 2002; Woods, 1978). I extend these ideas to the research framework, drawing from the student voice notion of dialogue as listening and speaking seriously and with respect, recognising the legitimacy of both adult and youth perspectives (Bourke and Loveridge, 2018; Grion and Cook-Sather, 2013). Respect has been a core value and the methodological foundation for foregrounding students’ perspectives in the research and its output, without fully relinquishing interpretative power as the researcher. To translate these premises into practice, critical reflexivity has been embedded in the research from the planning stages to the analysis of the data, following the principles of reflexive thematic analysis. 42 semi‑structured interviews were conducted with middle and high school students (ages 13–17) and teachers, online and in-person, between January and April 2025. During the interviews, participants were asked to complete a blank classroom diagram, placing their teachers/students, themselves, and factors that contribute to shaping STRs. Inspired by socio‑spatial mapping and relational diagramming approaches, the task allowed participants not only to represent their perceived relational space of the classroom but also to convey experiences through verbal and non-verbal means, supporting those who have a harder time expressing themselves (Donnelly, Gamsu and Whewall, 2020; Bagnoli, 2009; Umoquit et al., 2008). In addition, two focus groups with volunteer student participants were conducted in late May 2025 to establish a dialogue among them, the researchers and the ongoing analysis.

The research presented tried to address the tensions of engaging with young people in a study led by an adult researcher. On the one hand, using the diagrams as part of semi-structured interviews helped different voices to emerge and foster respect and reflexivity throughout the research. Framing relationships in context, the diagram allowed for mediating abstraction and situatedness, as participants represent relationships and dynamics that are meaningful to them within the context in which they exist. Not less importantly, it helped the researcher and participants explore and reflect on aspects of experience that would otherwise have remained untapped. Indeed, the diagram became a tool for reflecting on my positionality as a former student and researcher in becoming, as I created one ahead of the first interview. Nonetheless, the research process presented ethical and practical dilemmas of participation and epistemological power, heightened by the demands of working between two countries (the UK and Italy) with different education systems, cultures, and policies, such as the recruitment of student participants and the power dynamics of the interview encounter.

Ultimately, the paper offers methodological insights into how we can value young people’s perspectives while navigating the ethical dilemmas of their participation in research.

This contribution offers a reflection on education on differences from an intersectional and transfeminist perspective, developed through the experience of the association Scosse and the project Leggere senza stereotipi (Fierli et al. 2015; 2020). At its core lies the role of the picturebook as a mediating device that can reproduce cultural models and gender stereotypes (Gianini Belotti 1978; Turin 2003; Chabrol Gagne 2011), but also open spaces for imagination and normative deconstruction. This tension between “domestication” and “resistance” (Bruel 2022) characterizes a device that carries within itself a “semantic duplicity” (Campagnaro 2014): stories for young children are written and illustrated, but they are also selected and mediated by adults.

This dichotomous relationship is deeply infused with power, and it becomes even more pronounced in the case of wordless picturebooks. In this specific type of books, since reading does not depend on the comprehension of written language, meaning is constructed through an open dialogue with images. These images function as open questions, inspiring infinite responses and legitimizing multiple interpretations of the narrative through visual storytelling. This mechanism removes from adults the exclusive authority over reading, interpretation, and mediation, resulting in an inevitable and radical cession of power.

Within this framework, the practice of questioning emerges as a privileged pedagogical method for fostering critical awareness and a plurality of perspectives (Gamberi et al. 2010; Ghigi 2019). Through the analysis of picturebooks and comics for children, it becomes evident that “children’s questions” constitute a driving force in the construction of the self, in line with Cooley’s (1922) dialogical conception of the mind and with Freire and Faundez’s (1985) “pedagogy of the question.” Dialogue, circle time, and conversational circles (Muntoni 2005; Ginzburg 2017) are practices that restore authority and space for autonomy to children’s thoughts and processes, fostering a co-production of meanings and a horizontal form of learning grounded in listening, negotiation, and self-determination. This kind of literature also reveals children’s ability to competently address issues of gender and to question stereotypes that are internalized at an early age (Ellemers 2018; Fabes, Martin, Hanish 2019).

Since 2016, practices of questioning aimed at children and adolescents have been promoted through the project Fammi capire, which focuses on representations of bodies and sexualities in illustrated books. In dialogue with symbolic interactionism (Rinaldi 2016), this project makes it possible to create spaces for collective reflection and to observe how identities and sexual meanings are produced and negotiated in situated interaction. International literature also confirms the willingness and expressive urgency of younger generations with regard to gender identities and experiences (Ryan et al. 2013; Martino et al. 2016; Bartholomaeus et al. 2017; Perry et al. 2019).

Finally, radically deconstructive questioning practices aimed at challenging cis-heteronormativity and hierarchies of privilege (Borghi 2020; Paechter 2017; Lingiardi, Vassallo 2011) stand in contrast to “judging questions,” normative devices, and evaluative approaches. Educating children to ask questions from an early age thus becomes a transformative lever for denaturalizing the gender order and promoting inclusive, plural, and legitimizing environments for all subjectivities.

In post-democratic educational systems, student participation is frequently institutionalised yet substantively neutralised, reduced to consultative rituals within adult-centric governance structures (Sousa & Ferreira, 2024; Fielding, 2013; Hope, 2012a; Lundy 2007). Against this backdrop, this paper presents preliminary insights from an ongoing comparative doctoral project, “RE-DE-PART - Remagining Democratic Participation”, investigating how participatory and visual methodologies can both document and reconfigure democratic participation in secondary schools.

Grounded in the UNCRC (1989) and operationalised through Lundy's model of participation comprising space, voice, audience, and influence (Lundy, 2007; Lundy et al., 2011), the research adopts a qualitative, comparative (Yin, 2018) and participatory design (Pastori, 2017; Mantovani 2007) across three European upper-secondary schools characterised by distinct governance configurations. Particular attention is devoted to participatory video (Colucci, 2016; Lunch et al. 2006) and online video elicitation (Tobin et al., 2010) as epistemic, pedagogical and political devices capable of unsettling adult-centric regimes of knowledge production.

Rather than positioning young people as informants, participatory video reconfigures them as narrative agents and co-constructors of meaning. Through video diaries and collaboratively produced micro-documentaries, students document lived experiences of listening, exclusion, deliberation and influence. These artefacts are subsequently mobilised in transnational online video elicitation sessions, enabling dialogical comparison across contrasting democratic ecologies. The methodology thus becomes not only a tool of inquiry but a site where democratic practice is enacted and contested (de Lange & Geldenhuys, 2012; Rogers, 2016).

However, this repositioning generates acute ethical tensions. First, power asymmetries persist even within participatory designs: who frames the research questions, curates visibility, and ultimately authorises dissemination? Second, visibility itself is ambivalent. While participatory video amplifies voice and challenges epistemic marginalisation, it simultaneously exposes participants to institutional scrutiny, reputational risks and the politics of representation. Third, questions of epistemic authority emerge: are students recognised as legitimate interpreters of democratic life, or are their narratives reabsorbed into adult analytic frameworks?

Preliminary findings from the two highly participatory schools suggest that visual methodologies cultivate reflexive awareness of participation as lived power, revealing both enabling infrastructures (deliberative assemblies, sociocratic circles, negotiated curricula) and subtle reproductions of hierarchy. In the Italian case, operating within a more traditional governance structure, participatory video acts as a catalyst for intergenerational dialogue and as a lever for subsequent participatory intervention aimed at redistributing influence.

The paper argues that participatory video, when embedded within a critically reflexive and ethically negotiated framework, can contribute to epistemic justice by challenging credibility deficits and supporting students as legitimate knowers (Fricker, 2007; Burroughs & Tollefsen, 2016). Yet such transformation demands sustained negotiation of consent as process, collaborative management of research outputs, and a grounded redistribution of power. The question, therefore, is not merely whether children can speak or film, but whether educational institutions are willing to be transformed by what they reveal.

The present contribution will address a methodological reflection on the CLICK project “Connecting Families, Educators and Policymakers to Improve the Well-Being of LGBTIQ Children Through an Intersectional Approach”. The project seeks to enhance the well-being of LGBTIQ adolescents (14-18) by addressing gender-based violence and discrimination through an intersectional, child-centered, multi-actor framework involving youth, families, educators, and key policymakers.

Community-based participatory research (Fine & Torre, 2019; Puckett, 2017) aims to center the lived experiences of minoritized individuals and is widely employed in psychosocial field to actively engage queer individuals (Clements et al., 2025).

Our contribution will reflect on the meaning of constructing democratic research with adolescents whose lives and accountability are shaped by age-based discrimination and intersecting inequalities of gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability, as well as their need for protection (Mayo & Rodriguez, 2019). Rather than assuming adolescents’ participation in action-research as inherently emancipatory (James, 2007), we will explore the ethical and methodological challenges of making their participation meaningful, safe, active, and rooted in social justice.

CLICK adopted an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods design combining focus groups, surveys, and semi-structured interviews. Adolescents were engaged through diverse creative and dialogical tools intended to re-center their perspectives and recognize them as experts of their own lived experiences (Giorgi et al., 2021). The project also established a Children Advisory Board, where adolescents were recognized as key consultants, ensuring the rigorous implementation of the research, the soundness of the results, and the effectiveness of the outputs. We will discuss how facilitation practices were intended to decentralize adult authority and how institutional constraints (i.e., ethical committees, protection obligations, and funding frameworks) simultaneously enable and limit youth democratic participation.

We will discuss the need to balance between fostering visibility and active participation on the one hand and ensuring privacy and safety on the other. Therefore, a focus will be placed on the procedures for informed consent and confidentiality (Martínez Muñoz & Velásquez Crespo, 2021). Addressing discrimination, violence, and identity requires navigating consent, GDPR-compliant data management, and child protection protocols while keeping in mind the physical and psychological safety of adolescents who may have not yet disclosed their queer identity to their families or schools.

We will conclude by addressing questions of justice and co-construction of knowledge. While the needs and perspectives of young people, their well-being, and community resistance are key components of the project, transforming adolescents’ narratives into policy recommendations can raise significant issues of interpretation, intellectual ownership, and potential epistemic extractivism (Furman et al., 2019). A central inquiry will be to determine who speaks on behalf of whom in dissemination processes, and how the voices of young people are translated into institutional language.

Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, we will discuss how enabling adolescents to “speak” in research is not merely a matter of technique, but of democratic accountability. Within this framework, participation becomes a space where democracy is practiced, contested, and redefined. A reflexive model of child-centered research could conceptualize democracy not as a normative peripheral concern, but rather as an open-ended methodological challenge.

The use of photos to represent educational experiences is a common practice at least from the XIXth century that has left traces of educational practices and ideologies. Yet, alongside other sources relating to the cultural heritage of education, it is only in recent times that they have used for a renewed history of education that broadens the horizons beyond the focus on educators and teaching methods (Julia, 2010; Becchi, 2010; Ferrari, 2010; Zoppi, 2016; Dussel, 2013; del Pozo, 2020).

In the 2021 the Pio Istituto dei Sordi Foundation in Milan has started a reorganization project of its photographic archive relating to the life of the Istituto Sordomuti Poveri di Campagna di Milano. This project has created a fonds of over 1.000 photos that concern the life of the institution between 1852 and 1967 with the aim of filling a serious documentary gap in the documentation relating to the history of education of deaf people in Italy. It is a fundamental documentation for the history of the Italian Deaf education because it concerns the era of the special school for deaf and their overcoming resulting from the so-called “inclusion law” (Law no. 517 of 1977). This material allows us to refine our considerations about the public image of deaf people in the era of the institutionalization. This image has been very little studied and the reference sources are mainly those relating to the sector-specific press focused on two main roles: “the unhappy one” and “the benefactor” (Des Dorides, 2020). According to this narrative script, Italian press represented deafness by systematically resorting to rhetorical terms and constructions that confined deaf people in subordination. The photographs, however, evoke a more complex image that is closer to the students' perspective: that of a place of relationships and growth in which many students, often for the first time, constructed their own world of relationships and self-image (Debé&Des Dorides, 2024). This collection was digitized, catalogued and it is now available to the public in digital format.

In 2024, on the occasion of the 170th anniversary of the foundation of the Pio Istituto dei Sordi, this perspective was the key for the realisation of a photographic exhibition with augmented reality content: “More than a thousand words”. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and the ideas of the Public History of Education (Herman et. al., 2022; Bandini, 2023), this exhibition, aimed at enhancing this cultural heritage, had the main objective of giving back to the community, with mainly visual sources, an alternative key to the experience of special schools for the deaf in Italy. Thanks to the development of a native app the use of images, archive documents and bibliographical sources merged with the stories of former pupils that come to life thanks to augmented reality allowing for in-depth multimedia content (texts, images and LIS videos). The aim of this paper is to illustrate the solutions adopted for the realization of the photographic exhibition and the approaches adopted to share processes and outcomes.