Conference Program

Abstract

Within the contemporary landscape of lifelong guidance policies, countering social inequalities requires approaches that go beyond mere information delivery, focusing instead on promoting individuals' substantive freedoms. From this perspective, this contribution is situated within the framework of the Capability Approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011) and interprets guidance as a tool for social justice (Cedefop, 2025). The aim is to enable the 'capacity to aspire' (Appadurai, 2013) in individuals affected by biographical discontinuity.

In Italy, Provincial Centres for Adult Education (CPIA) are currently configured as laboratories for educational innovation and hubs for active citizenship (Indire, 2025). These centres represent diverse contexts where managing educational asymmetries requires pedagogy that is sensitive to the complexities of migrants' lived experiences (Zoletto, 2024). However, guidance for these adults often suffers from institutional fragmentation, which risks leading to deskilling pathways. This paper analyses the 'DiMMi – Diari Multimediali Migranti' (Migrant Multimedia Diaries) project as a narrative guidance model aimed at countering these marginalising pressures by enhancing the student's 'narrative capital'. In line with the current trends in Italian intercultural pedagogy (Fiorucci, 2024; Silva, 2025), self-narration is regarded as a vital career management skill. Practising multimedia autobiography using the autobiographical method (Demetrio, 1996) enables individuals to reconstruct the fragmented elements of their educational history and transform them into valuable resources for future planning and development. This study explores a training workshop designed for CPIA teachers, structured around three key dimensions of the call.

Prevention of marginalisation: storytelling counters social invisibility and fosters recognition of prior skills which are often misinterpreted by the labour market.

Integration between systems: the DiMMi model promotes territorial networks between schools, libraries and the third sector, anticipating the coordination between institutional systems recommended by integrated European policies.

Development of reflective skills: transitioning from memory to multimedia narration enhances reflexivity and digital skills, both of which are essential for autonomy throughout life.

Particular attention will be paid to describing the 'territorial reading committees' model, in which learners are directly involved to foster civic agency. In conclusion, this study demonstrates how the DiMMi method provides a pedagogical approach to empowering migrants (Fiorucci, 2024). Proposing narration as a lifelong guidance tool promotes a democratic school that places the right to storytelling at its centre, which is a prerequisite for overcoming asymmetries and social inequalities.

Lifelong guidance is often presented as a key tool to reduce social inequalities, but in Italy it still operates within a fragmented “non-system” rather than within integrated policies. In schools, guidance is frequently occasional and deadline-driven, linked to administrative requirements more than to structured career management skills’ education. Moreover, the absence of dedicated experts and shared standards is compounded by highly inadequate indicators of effectiveness. The situation does not improve in the context of labor market policies, where guidance is commonly reduced to mere job placement. Organizational incentives and performance indicators favor quick and measurable outputs instead of quality and sustainable career outcomes. As a result, coordination between education, training, employment services, and third sector organizations remains weak. Information on training options and labor market rules is often not sufficiently “decoded” for users, and responsibility for guidance is widespread but not clearly owned: guidance tasks are delegated to staff who cover them because of role proximity, without solid methods, common tools, or specific accountability. In this context, a frequent “solution” is improvisation: prescriptive interventions focused on immediate choices and short-term jobs, where practitioners decide for the person instead of strengthening agency, self-efficacy, exploration, and responsible decision-making.
The situation of refugees makes these structural problems visible in an amplified way. Refugees face multiple and overlapping transitions (legal status, language, recognition of qualifications, social networks, and implicit workplace norms) that require continuous, integrated guidance. Available evidence suggests that structured career counselling can enhance transferable resources such as career adaptability and both work self-efficacy and job search self-efficacy. However, when guidance is mainly delivered by reception staff or active labor market policy operators without specific training in career guidance, practice tends to follow the immediate demand for employment. In these cases, many potentially formative experiences in the host country are not transformed into career capital: skills remain unrecognized, vocational interests stay weak or poorly differentiated, outcome expectations are unstable, and choices are made with limited information. This increases the risk of deskilling and of being trapped in marginal labor market segments, producing quick but fragile integration.
Refugee pathways, therefore, should not be treated as a niche topic. They work as an indicator of the overall robustness of a lifelong guidance system. The core implication is a shift from fragmented services to integrated lifelong guidance policies: clear professional profiles, shared standards across school and employment sectors, evidence-based training, multi-professional teams, and evaluation metrics that include quality, coherence, and sustainability of outcomes, not only contrast to early school leaving placement.

Guidance in educational and career choices plays a key role in tackling social inequalities, as it shapes educational and professional trajectories, decision-making capacity, and access to opportunities. In socio-economically vulnerable contexts, the lack of guidance often reinforces existing inequalities, limits the range of perceived options, and pushes individuals toward “probable” paths rather than those aligned with their interests and potential. By contrast, an accessible and integrated lifelong guidance system helps widen horizons and supports the development of agency across the life course.

This contribution presents two complementary experiences: the "Sportello Orientamento di Quartiere - SPOQ" (Neighborhood guidance desk), designed as local hubs for young people and adults in vulnerable situations, and the Choice Funnel Desks, implemented in more than ten upper secondary schools across Sicily. In both settings, our guidance approach combines three key dimensions: self-exploration (interests, desires, values), contextual understanding (education and training pathways, labour market dynamics, rights and services), and the development of realistic yet flexible action plans. Our experience shows that requests for guidance go well beyond school choice: they often involve economic pressures, access to employment, interrupted transitions, returns to education, and the redefinition of life plans. In this sense, guidance helps prevent long-term inequalities by reducing information gaps, strengthening confidence and agency, and framing disorientation as a meaningful step in rethinking one’s future. Rather than pushing students toward early or predefined decisions, we support a progressive clarification of options, allowing uncertainty, anxiety and exploration to become part of the learning process through a gradual focusing that remains open-ended and reversible, while maintaining a strong relational dimension to accompany individuals in exploring possible futures and identifying those they find truly desirable. Hence, the guidance practitioner emerges as a “reflective guide” and “bridging figure” with psycho-pedagogical competencies, networking skills, and updated knowledge of education, training, and the labour market.

A further issue addressed is the fragmentation of guidance services. Positioned at the crossroads of schools, training systems, social services, the third sector, and active labour market policies, guidance often suffers from a lack of coordination, leading to overlaps or gaps in support—especially for those in disadvantaged conditions. Send ETS desks act as bottom-up integration points, identifying needs, translating information, and activating well-grounded referrals to local services and opportunities, thus contributing to the creation of local support networks within an educating community framework.

The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications for integrated lifelong guidance policies, arguing that effectiveness depends not only on the quality of relational practices, but also on the ability to ensure continuity and coordination across institutions, within a rights-based and/or capability-oriented perspective.

This paper offers a theoretically grounded and critically informed socio-pedagogical analysis of the Community Educational Pact “School, University, Territory: for Quality Guidance”, promoted at the University of Trapani within a broader research programme on territorial governance and integrated educational policies. The study is framed within the paradigm of lifelong guidance understood both as a social right and as a strategic educational infrastructure aimed at mitigating structural inequalities. It rests on the assumption that guidance is not an ancillary service but a constitutive mechanism shaping educational trajectories, mediating school-to-work transitions, and influencing access to social participation and life chances.

In response to the institutional fragmentation that characterizes the Italian educational and welfare system—where schools, universities, active labour market policies, and local authorities often operate through parallel and weakly coordinated governance logics—the Trapani Pact is conceptualized as a multi-level integrative dispositif. It formalizes a structured network connecting schools, higher education institutions, territorial authorities, and socio-economic actors, with the objective of constructing a territorially embedded guidance ecosystem capable of supporting students and young adults throughout the educational lifecycle and across key transitional phases.

The Pact involves all 23 upper secondary schools in the area and 26 territorial institutions, including the Prefecture, municipalities, the Diocese, the Provincial Health Authority, the Regional School Office, the Department of Education and Vocational Training of the Sicilian Region, law enforcement agencies, judicial bodies, and Sicindustria. Given the breadth of its inter-institutional network and the systemic ambition of its objectives, the initiative represents a distinctive case within the national context. It functions as an integrated educational governance arrangement oriented toward the coordinated and co-designed provision of services, resources, and opportunities for students.

Findings emerging from the case indicate that, when embedded in a collaborative and territorially anchored framework, guidance can evolve from an episodic and primarily informational activity into a continuous process of empowerment. This transformation is grounded in the development of career management competences, the critical interpretation of educational and occupational opportunity structures, and the strengthening of territorially situated social capital. Within this framework, the Pact operates as a collaborative governance instrument integrating school-based, transitional, and employment-oriented guidance, thereby overcoming sectoral fragmentation and fostering institutional co-responsibility.

Based on a qualitative analysis of foundational documents, implemented actions, and preliminary empirical evidence from the ongoing research, the paper identifies both enabling factors and structural constraints of the model. It also reflects on its transferability and its capacity to address educational and occupational inequalities in a socio-economically fragile territorial context.

The contribution concludes by advancing a theoretical reflection on lifelong guidance as an integrated public policy domain, engaging capability- and rights-based approaches, and proposing the Community Educational Pact as a laboratory of institutional innovation oriented toward social justice and the democratization of educational and professional opportunities.

Note: This proposal aims to present the results of my PhD research project.

Lifelong guidance has gained renewed relevance in Europe as education systems, labour markets, and welfare institutions are asked to support increasingly complex educational and occupational transitions. Yet, as a policy domain located at the boundary between education/training and active labour market policies, career guidance remains comparatively under-explored through the lenses of mainstream public policy analysis. The research try to address this gap by analysing regional career guidance policy instrument mixes in Italy and explaining their variation. This level of governance is strategic as the “middle tier” (Hooley & Godden, 2022), where the abstract objectives of the EU and the national level are translated into concrete actions through territorial planning and coordination with local public and private entities, which are essentially the “street-level” implementers (Lipsky, 1980).

The study asks: (RQ1) which policy instruments constitute the regional career guidance instrument mix, and (RQ2) what explains the variation in these mixes. It adopts a most similar systems design by selecting two comparable regions - Veneto and Lombardy - which share high levels of socio-economic development, similar labour market and education-training structures, social stratification, political alignment, and exposure to European influence, yet display markedly different approaches to career guidance policy design. Methodologically, the research combines content analysis of policy documents with 43 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in career guidance governance and delivery (regional officials, accredited providers, social partners, and institutional actors).

The theoretical framework builds on the classic concept of policy style (Richardson, 1982; Howlett & Tosun, 2021) and reworks it at the subnational level as regional policy style (Knodt, 1997), drawing on a multidimensional model that links: (i) ideological subculture as a foundational driver; (ii) policy paradigms (how the problem is conceptualised); (iii) governance (patterns of actors’ relationships and coordination); and (iv) administrative style (standard operating procedures and the day-to-day translation of political priorities into action). The central hypothesis is that collaborative, programmatic, and politically stable regional settings tend to produce more coherent mixes, whereas weaker problem definition, fragmented governance, and less participatory administrative styles tend to generate fragmented mixes.

Findings show a clear divergence: Veneto exhibits a comparatively coherent and integrated instrument mix, anchored in a small number of key regional laws, clear organisational structures, and the strategic funding of territorial networks and dedicated guidance measures—supporting regional steering and system-wide integration. Lombardy, by contrast, displays a more complex and fragmented mix, characterised by a larger number of instruments, multiple coordination venues, and a strong emphasis on individual choice and public–private competition consistent with a regulated quasi-market paradigm; this creates weaker integration across measures, while also leaving room for experimentation and innovation in specific policy windows. Overall, the analysis confirms that distinct regional “institutional personalities” - evoked metaphorically as Veneto’s “Bach-like” orchestration versus Lombardy’s “Coltrane-like” improvisation - help explain why similar contexts yield different instrumental configurations, highlighting the often-underestimated role of governance and political continuity in shaping coherent policy mixes.

Guidance systems across Europe address inequality through service access and information provision, assuming the main obstacle is informational. Both research and practice challenge this premise. Within the life design paradigm (Savickas et al., 2009; Savickas, 2019), career guidance supports people in constructing biographical narratives across transitions. Yet a critical question remains underexplored: what makes such construction possible, or impossible, for those whose resources have been eroded by structural disadvantage?

This contribution, grounded in systematic reflective practice (Schön, 1983) within ASNOR's national network across school, school-to-work transition, and employment services, identifies a form of inequality that existing frameworks do not name. Practitioners consistently observe a recurring pattern: people arrive at guidance encounters with adequate information but without conditions to integrate it biographically, disorientation rather than orientation. The adverse conditions are not informational but biographical: material deprivation, relational abandonment, social marginalisation, cultural isolation. Drawing on Bourdieu's (1986) analysis of how structural disadvantage becomes embodied in dispositions, and Floridi's (2014) account of how information saturation erodes the capacity for meaning, we propose semantic inequality: the unequal distribution of conditions under which people can access, process, and regenerate meaning at life transitions.

Within Nussbaum's (2011) capability framework, this constitutes a capability failure: the deprivation of conditions for practical reasoning and autonomous life planning. Sultana (2014) locates the problem in the rationalities determining who guidance systems serve. Semantic inequality makes this concrete: when guidance requires interpretive resources that people lack as a precondition, it reproduces the injustice it claims to address.

Neurocognitive evidence democratises this argument. Merleau-Ponty's (1945) phenomenology establishes that meaning arises through the lived body, not a disembodied mind. We draw a democratic claim: if meaning-making is bodily, its foundation is universally shared; what is unequally distributed are the conditions for its exercise. Panksepp and Biven's (2012) research on the SEEKING system shows that when conditions are adverse, people lose the motivational drive to engage with biographical possibilities. Memory reconsolidation research (Lane et al., 2015) shows that biographical narratives can be reorganised, but only under relational safety that environments must provide. These findings ground the policy argument: if meaning-making requires specific conditions, designing them is not an optional service but a structural obligation.

EU lifelong guidance guidelines (ELGPN, 2015) address service access, information quality, and institutional coordination. We propose a fourth level: the structural design of conditions under which universal meaning-making capacity is activated across the guidance system. This requires a prior act: policy must first recognise what erodes that capacity, poverty, isolation, absence of recognition, before designing conditions to restore it. This directly addresses the individual responsibility gap CEDEFOP (2025) identifies as unresolved. The framework generates four outcomes: a sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954) for research, a diagnostic question for every service node - do the conditions for meaning-making exist here? - reframing quality from information delivered to conditions created, a fourth policy level, and a systemic design principle. This paper advances the design of guidance systems where every person is seen before being served.