Conference Program

This contribution advances and deepens the reflections developed in a previous study conducted within the three-year research project PON Green (2022–2025), “The Ecological Challenge: Innovative Educational Practices”. The earlier contribution reconstructed the principal trajectories of national and international debates on teacher professionalism in education for sustainable development (ESD) (Ilardo & Salinaro, 2023). Building on that groundwork, the current study shifts the analytical focus and it advances a critical examination of the conceptual and normative architectures that currently shape ESD, expanding the analysis beyond existing frameworks. Drawing on decolonial prospective (Stain et al., 2023) and critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1983), the contribution analyses the epistemological assumptions embedded in dominant sustainability discourses, with particular attention to competency-based models in secondary education. The study develops two interrelated lines of inquiry. Firstly, the proposal reconsiders the reference frameworks guiding education for sustainable development, with particular attention to competency-based models and their normative implications. Secondly, it addresses the ongoing debate on sustainability competencies and their impact on the construction of teachers’ professional identity. The analysis conceptualizes competencies as historically and culturally situated formations, embedded within specific configurations of power and value systems, and examines their contextual and normative dimensions. This reflection is conducted through an intercultural and critical perspective that understands the ecological question as intrinsically intertwined with diversity, inclusion, global justice, and transnational interdependencies, within European educational contexts shaped by colonial legacies and multicultural configurations (Nijhawan, 2024; Stein et al., 2020). Within this framework, this critical reorientation carries significant implications for how teacher professionalism is conceptualised and implemented (Singh et al., 2025). If sustainability education is embedded within historically situated regimes of knowledge and power, then teachers cannot be positioned merely as neutral implementers of predefined competencies. Instead, they are called to mediate plural epistemologies and engage reflexively with the normative assumptions embedded in policy frameworks. From this perspective, the critical frameworks adopted in this contribution perform a dual function. Analytically, they illuminate the tensions and contradictions of ESD policies and competency discourses. Practically, they inform transformative interventions in teacher education and school practice, linking sustainability competencies to intercultural dialogue and climate-related emotions (Butler, 2025; Voşki et al., 2024; Vercammen et al., 2023).

Ecological crises are increasingly understood as being shaped by dominant narratives about nature, territory, and human-environment relationships. These narratives are not only articulated through discourse but also embedded in representational practices that influence how environments are perceived, documented, and taught in educational contexts. Among these practices, maps occupy a particularly powerful position: historically associated with processes of territorial control, abstraction, and colonial ordering (MacDonald, 2024), cartographic representations have contributed to producing authoritative ways of seeing and organising space (Hirt, 2022).
Within educational settings, maps are often introduced primarily as technical instruments for orientation and spatial accuracy. Such uses may inadvertently reproduce a detached and objectifying relation to environments, positioning learners as observers of static spaces to be decoded, measured, and mastered. In response to these concerns, this contribution proposes a theoretical and methodological reflection on mapping practices in ecological and outdoor education, drawing on insights from critical cartography, children’s geographies, and participatory research (Lanouette et al., 2024).
The contribution argues that maps can be reinterpreted as documentation devices capable of capturing situated experiences of place. When mapping is approached as a process rather than as the production of a correct representation, maps become personal narrative artefacts that document how environments are encountered, remembered, and interpreted through lived experience. In outdoor and place-based educational contexts, maps produced by children and young people often integrate spatial references with memories, emotions, encounters with human and more-than-human beings, and questions emerging from exploration (Somerville, 2013). From this perspective, mapping becomes a way of documenting not only spatial elements but also the relational and affective dimensions of ecological learning.
This shift opens a connection with counter-mapping traditions (Ingold, 2011) that challenge dominant cartographic imaginaries by foregrounding alternative perspectives and situated knowledges. While counter-mapping has often been associated with indigenous, activist, and community-based practices, similar principles can inform educational contexts in which learners are invited to produce their own maps of places they inhabit and explore. In these situations, mapping can function as a pedagogical practice that makes visible the plurality of ways in which environments are experienced and interpreted.
The contribution also reflects on the role of educators in facilitating such practices. When maps are treated as open-ended documentation processes rather than evaluative products, they can support plural interpretations of place and challenge adult-centred epistemic hierarchies. This creates space for children’s perspectives to emerge as meaningful forms of knowing, while recognising their agency (Clark, 2011) in interpreting and narrating relationships with local ecologies.
By framing maps as documentation tools within a counter-mapping perspective, this contribution suggests that mapping practices in ecological education can help deconstruct dominant spatial imaginaries and foster more relational ways of understanding different environments.

This contribution explores the practice of observation not as a passive act, but as an active pedagogical and research tool aimed at fostering ecological postures (Guerra, 2019). Through experimentation and documentation - at the intersection of scientific rigor and aesthetic sensitivity (Guerra, 2020) - the act of observing is transformed into a relational framework that allows the "other" (whether human or non-human) to manifest in its own alterity. Recalling Mary Oliver’s poetic triad (“pay attention, be astonished, tell about it”, in Oliver, 2008), this approach outlines an educational posture where vivid attention becomes the premise for authentic ecological dwelling. The objective is to present observation as an exercise of slow looking (Tishamn, 2018) and in deep listening capable of unsettling the already known, promoting an education based on reciprocity and vital participation in the world. These are pivotal elements for a World-based Education that values the biodiversity of contexts and experiences (Persico, Guerra, Galimberti, eds., 2024; Luini, Persico, Galimberti, Guerra, eds. 2025). Exercising the gaze and giving back the experience through documentation—understood as a research device that transforms the encounter with the other into an open narrative—means inhabiting a framework of reciprocity that creates space for the biodiversity of both subjects and phenomena.

This contribution proposes a pedagogical analysis of the process involved in the creation of a fanzine produced by a group of students enrolled in the Bachelor’s Degree in Educational Sciences at the end of the course Environmental Pedagogy, held at the Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa” at the University of Milano-Bicocca. In this context, the fanzine is conceived as a tool for reflection and expression through which students can rework their learning experiences and articulate their own perspectives. At the same time, it is understood as a method for producing counter-narratives around ecological issues, with particular attention to outdoor education and biodiversity, approached from a gender-sensitive perspective. Historically rooted in grassroots cultural practices, fanzines have functioned as spaces for the circulation of alternative knowledge, often giving voice to marginalized groups and subcultures. In this sense, the fanzine becomes both an individual and collective device of visibility and expression. The possibility of combining different expressive languages—such as collage, personal and borrowed writings, sketches, and textures—transforms the page into an experimental aesthetic space where students can explore composition, balance, and style.

The creation process unfolds through several phases in which individual productions are progressively reworked through overlaps with others’ contributions, the transformation of proportions, and the selection of paper types, formats, and colors. In this layered process, the collective narrative gradually takes shape. Elements often considered imperfections—such as errors, distortions, or unexpected results—are instead valued as meaningful components of the creative process, contributing to the aesthetic and expressive richness of the final artifact. Through printed reproductions and the superimposition of visual layers, graphic experimentation allows for shifts in perspective and the emergence of a stratified narrative. From a pedagogical perspective, the creation of a fanzine can therefore be understood as a practice that fosters democratic participation, relational learning, and education to consent, while dynamically negotiating the tensions between ethics and aesthetics, the individual and the collective, and the personal and the political.

This abstract seeks to explore the persistence of fascism in the Pasolinian sense, understood as a pervasive and totalizing phenomenon that continues to permeate contemporary society (Pasolini, 2015). From this perspective, fascism cannot be confined to its historical manifestation in the twentieth century; rather, it survives as a diffuse cultural form operating within languages, social practices, and symbolic structures of late modernity. In this context, particular attention is devoted to the metaphor of the “fireflies,” introduced by Pasolini as an emblem of a resilient and sensitive humanity capable of preserving forms of resistance in the face of the progressive erosion of identities and the growing cultural homogenization that characterize contemporary societies.

This symbolic image is intertwined with a broader ecological and political urgency: the need to safeguard humanity’s material and immaterial heritage and traditions. Such heritage should be understood not merely as a repository of the past, but as a living resource for the construction of the future. From this perspective, the protection of cultural heritage emerges as a crucial safeguard for the demilitarization of the world, of language, and of individual life, in accordance with the founding principles promoted by international organizations devoted to cultural cooperation (UNESCO, 1946).

Within this framework, the sciences of education and training assume a central and strategic role. They represent a privileged domain through which critical, imaginative, and relational capacities can be cultivated among new generations. Education cannot therefore be reduced to the mere transmission of knowledge; rather, it contributes to the formation of reflective and responsible subjectivities capable of interpreting the complexities of the present and envisioning alternative futures. In this sense, educational sciences constitute a key field for the development of democratic awareness and for the promotion of pedagogical practices oriented toward ethical responsibility and civic engagement.

Didi-Huberman (2010), reinterpreting Benjamin’s thought (2014) and critically engaging with Pasolini’s reflections, identifies in the fragile yet persistent light of images a concrete possibility for connecting the “Already-been” and the “Now.” This temporal relation restores historical depth to the present and enables the future to be infused with genuine political agency. Images, much like the metaphorical fireflies, persist despite the overwhelming glare of technological and media overexposure, opening spaces for symbolic resistance and critical reflection.

Marchetti (2022) further develops this perspective by emphasizing the distinctive role of oral tradition in human civilization. Narration, orality, and oraliture represent fundamental roots of human evolution, linking contemporary societies—marked by a crisis of narration—to early symbolic expressions such as the cave paintings of Chauvet. Within this perspective, educational sciences are called upon to preserve and renew the narrative dimension of human experience, recognizing storytelling as a fundamental pedagogical device for identity construction and cultural transmission.