Conference Program

The Italian university system is now called upon to train professionals capable of operating in complex educational contexts, marked by structural fragility, organisational transformations, and growing demands for reflective, socio-emotional, and planning skills (Boffo, 2021; Ferrante & Gambacorti-Passerini, 2023). The latest data from Eurostat and the OECD highlight a mismatch between university education and society's needs, necessitating a rethink of educational models and practices (Oggionni, 2016). This gap is particularly evident in educational and social services, where professional work is based on relationships and takes place in unstable contexts characterised by multidimensional stresses and structural precariousness (Giovanazzi, 2022; Tramma, 2018).
In this context, pedagogical supervision represents a privileged observatory for questioning the role of the university in the construction of advanced professionalism (Oggionni & Palmieri, 2019). Understood as a formative and reflective tool, it supports the critical analysis of practices, promoting professional awareness, the quality of educational action, and the prevention of burnout (Oggionni, 2013; Olivieri, 2024).
This paper provides an overview of Italian educational programmes dedicated to pedagogical supervision, based on a desk analysis of public universities offering degree courses in education, supplemented by 15 interviews with university teachers who deal with the subject professionally and in their research. The results of the desk analysis paint a fragmented picture: there are no courses dedicated explicitly to pedagogical supervision; the topic appears only in more general courses or in some workshops. The area in which more structured support is observed is curricular internships, where, however, practices are heterogeneous. In addition, several master’s degrees and advanced training courses in supervision are emerging, but they are concentrated at a few universities.
The interviews highlight a growing awareness of the need to integrate practical skills, reflective tools, and experiential methodologies into university curricula. At the same time, they emphasise the urgent need to strengthen dialogue with educational services and experienced professionals in order to bridge the gap between academic training and operational requirements. In parallel, experimentation with a supervision model in a home education service has further highlighted the needs of professionals, including managing operational loneliness, emotional load, case complexity, and the need to maintain a reflective and planning posture. These skills require solid, situated theoretical and practical training that cannot be improvised.
The emergence of these elements confirms that pedagogical supervision is not only a support mechanism but also an indicator of the quality of university education (Madriz, 2019). In contexts where educational professionals are called upon to perform secondary functions, the gap between theory and practice is a critical issue (Cornacchia, 2020). The contribution, therefore, proposes rethinking the university as an educational infrastructure capable of establishing a stable dialogue with professional contexts, integrating reflexivity and socio-emotional skills into curricula (Stanzione & Di Genova, 2024). Among the avenues for transformation are the structural inclusion of reflective devices, the strengthening of internships, the consolidation of links with services, and the development of specific training programmes for educational supervisors.

The Italian university system is undergoing a phase of institutional reconfiguration marked by structural reforms, external evaluation mechanisms (from the AVA system to the ANVUR guidelines on teaching quality) and growing social expectations in terms of skills and employability. The persistent misalignment between stated educational objectives and actual results suggests that the issue is not exclusively related to curricula and teaching methodologies, but also to the institutional framework within which educational responsibility is defined, distributed and implemented.

International literature has progressively redefined academic leadership, shifting the focus from an individual and hierarchical conception to a relational and distributed perspective (Bryman, 2007; Bolden et al., 2012). More recent studies highlight how the sustainability of university innovation depends on the integration of strategic and pedagogical dimensions (Dinh et al., 2020; Cheng et al., 2024; Maheshwari et al., 2024) and how, in the absence of structured liaison mechanisms, responsibility for improving teaching tends to remain diffuse but poorly formalised, generating discontinuity in change processes (Cardinali & Cinque, 2025; Serbati, 2025).

This paper takes academic leadership as an analytical category to interpret the misalignment between educational intentions and actual results, proposing a reinterpretation of it as the pedagogical infrastructure of the university. This expression does not refer to a top-level function or a set of individual skills, but rather to the institutional configuration that makes educational responsibility visible, coordinated and sustainable, integrating academic strategy, teaching coordination and faculty development.

The objective is:

1. To develop a theoretical definition of pedagogical infrastructure as a meso-institutional level that organises the relationships between governance, teaching design and professional development.

2. To analyse how this infrastructure is actually configured in Italian universities.

3. To identify organisational indicators of its consolidation.

The research integrates an exploratory qualitative survey based on:

• Semi-structured interviews with teaching coordination figures (programme directors, teaching delegates, faculty development representatives).

• Documentary analysis of institutional university mechanisms (strategic plans, AVA documents, teaching regulations).

The thematic analysis made it possible to reconstruct the links between strategic direction, teaching coordination and professional development, identifying emerging configurations of pedagogical infrastructure.

The results highlight different configurations of pedagogical infrastructure, characterised by varying degrees of formalisation, integration and continuity. In contexts where the link between strategy, teaching coordination and faculty development is structured and institutionalised, educational quality emerges as a systemic principle; conversely, where this link is entrusted to episodic or individual initiatives, improvement processes are fragmented and discontinuous.

In line with Italian reflections on the role of Teaching and Learning Centres and faculty development as strategic levers of quality (Perla, 2023; Felisatti, 2023), the analysis suggests that the systematisation of faculty development pathways is a relevant indicator of the consolidation of the pedagogical infrastructure at university level. It operates as a structural device for integration between academic autonomy, educational responsibility and teaching quality, configuring leadership not as an individual attribute but as an organisational condition of university quality.

In recent decades, universities internationally have progressively developed institutional structures dedicated to supporting teaching and the professional development of faculty members. In many contexts, these structures are commonly referred to as Teaching and Learning Centers, although their names, functions, and organizational models may vary across different higher education systems. In the Italian university context, there is no shared terminology, and institutions adopt different names to refer to initiatives and structures aimed at improving the quality of teaching and developing the pedagogical skills of faculty members. Despite the growing attention to faculty development and the improvement of university teaching, the presence of such structures in the Italian university system is still largely unexplored. This contribution presents a national mapping of institutional structures dedicated to supporting teaching in Italian universities. The Italian higher education system includes state universities, recognized non-state universities, special-status university institutes, and online universities, all of which are part of a national accreditation and quality assurance system defined by the Ministry of University and Research and monitored by the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR), which attributes increasing importance to the quality of teaching. The research adopts a mapping methodology based on document analysis and systematic exploration of the institutional websites of accredited universities in Italy. The analysis considered a total of 106 universities, with the aim of identifying the presence or absence of structures dedicated to teaching support and professional development for teachers. The preliminary results show a heterogeneous picture. Some universities have a formal structure dedicated to teaching support and faculty development, while in many other institutions no such structure exists. In other cases, there are initiatives for teaching innovation or teacher training, but these are not organized within a clearly identifiable institutional structure. The mapping represents a first attempt to systematize the spread of teaching support structures in the Italian university system and provides an empirical basis for future research on the role of such structures in improving the quality of university teaching.

In recent years, the quality of university teaching has become a growing focus of attention, in response to the complexity of the contexts and issues that higher education is called upon to address: from the emergence of increasingly multifaceted training needs of new generations, to the challenges posed by online teaching and the use of technologies, to the internal and external pressures related to quality assessment procedures for academic processes (EHEA, 2020; Lewis, 2010; Harrison et al., 2022; Sorcinelli, 2020). These challenges also affect the Italian academic context, which is engaged in transformation and innovation in teaching/learning and, in an integrated manner, in organisational and institutional aspects (Lotti & Lampugnani, 2020; QUARC_Docente, 2017; Silva, 2022).

University lecturers assume an intermediate and strategic position between the design of the educational offer, on the one hand, and the learning processes of students, on the other (Cadei et al. 2024). Their professional development can thus represent a functional goal also for innovative processes in the field of teaching, bringing benefits not only to the individual teacher but also to various dimensions of the university, both operational and cultural (Sorcinelli, 2020; Steinert, 2014). In this perspective, faculty development tools that, in addressing and promoting the professionalism of the university teacher, are capable of producing impacts on the organizational arrangements of teaching and on the collegial climate stand out as particularly significant - even starting from “bottom-up” initiatives that can be recognized and valued in the institutional context (Cadei et al., 2025; Lampugnani & Picasso, 2025; Steinert, 2010).

This is the line taken by this paper, which aims to explore the potential of Peer Observation of Teaching (POT) as a professional development tool and, at the same time, as an opportunity to promote a collegial and collaborative approach to teaching (Bell, 2001; Hammersley-Fletcher & Orsmond, 2005; Martin & Double, 1998; Hendry et al., 2021). The subject of the study is a POT experiment carried out at an Italian university (Cadei et al., 2025), using a collaborative model in which pairs of teachers observe each other and exchange feedback for training purposes rather than evaluation (Gosling, 2002; Fletcher, 2018).

The qualitative methodology adopts an interpretative approach and focuses on the post-observation phase, dedicated to sharing observations among teachers. The analysis, through the examination of the transcripts of the sessions, develops progressively: first, the themes and points of attention that emerge with regard to teaching practice and teaching are identified; second, these elements are read to investigate whether and how the experience of participating in POT is distinguished by its educational value at an individual and peer level.

In light of the results that will be collected, the contribution aims to reflect on the potential value of professional support and discussion mechanisms in universities – such as POT – and, in this direction, contribute to enriching the ongoing debate on the mission of teaching in higher education (Harrison et al., 2022; Steinert, 2014), with particular reference to the Italian context (Silva, 2022; Lampugnani & Picasso, 2025).

The current debate on the future of higher education(HE)in Italy has been sparked by international studies highlighting that the Italian university system lags significantly behind certain European averages in terms of the percentage of young graduates and their ability to address the challenges of contemporary society.This evidence suggests that this gap cannot be interpreted solely in quantitative terms, but must be understood as a symptom of a deeper misalignment between educational models rooted in the past and the learning styles of the new generations.In this sense,the Italian university model still appears tied to traditional pedagogical paradigms that struggle to adapt to the cultural,technological,and cognitive transformations characterizing contemporary educational contexts.This paper offers a critical reflection on the transformations of the university learning ecosystem,focusing in particular on the processes through which academic institutions are attempting to redefine their teaching practices.In this context,a central element concerns the growing focus on the pedagogical training of university faculty,promoted in part through the proliferation of Teaching and Learning Centers (TLCs),which represent one of the main tools through which universities seek to support faculty professional development, fostering the development of pedagogical,digital,and assessment skills,and promoting teaching practices more oriented toward active student participation.This renewed focus on the pedagogical dimension, however,is part of a broader transformation of university learning environments.The gradual integration of digital platforms with asynchronous or blended teaching models and the use of AI has in fact helped redefine not only how educational content is accessed, but also the timing of learning,the relational dynamics between faculty and students,and the ways in which knowledge is constructed.At the same time,these pedagogical and organizational transformations are part of broader processes of restructuring educational policies that,in recent decades,have progressively redefined the role of the university in contemporary societies.In particular,the growing prevalence of governance models inspired by principles of efficiency and competitiveness can be interpreted in light of the neoliberalization of HE,which has contributed to promoting dynamics of institutional differentiation.In this context, the principle of normative equivalence which characterizes the Italian university system and recognizes equal validity for degrees awarded by state, non-state, private, and online universities takes on particular significance.While this principle guarantees a formal legal equivalence of educational programs, it also raises significant questions regarding the actual conditions under which teaching and learning processes unfold.Questioning the equivalence of the institutional nature of universities means, in fact, also questioning the effectiveness of educational processes and the ways in which students develop disciplinary and cross-disciplinary competencies.From this perspective, the apparent regulatory homogeneity of the university system does not necessarily imply a real equivalence of learning conditions.Structural and organizational differences regarding available resources, pedagogical cultures,and educational infrastructure can significantly impact students’ educational experiences.Critically analyzing the relationship between the institutional nature of universities, the configuration of learning environments,and the development of students’ competencies therefore allows us to problematize the very idea of equivalence among institutions and to contribute to a broader reflection on the transformations and future prospects of HE in the Italian context.