Conference Program

This paper investigates the constitutive role of art in early childhood and childhood education, a role that extends beyond a purely instrumental or recreational dimension. The hypothesis is that artistic experience, as a cognitive and transformative practice, acts as a catalyst for reorganizing educational practices towards a model of circular knowledge, where traditional pedagogical dichotomies dissolve into an ecological and relational paradigm (MIM, 2021). Within this framework, each creative act by the child is reconceived as a unified act of expression and reflection (MIM, 2012). It is not merely a matter of producing an artifact, but of understanding artistic doing as discovery, play, and a cognitive process mediated through a medium (painting, clay, movement, sound, digital), in a process where sensory experience, manipulation, and symbolic elaboration are inseparable (Munari, 1977). The resulting learning is dynamic and integrated, following not a linear but a reticular and regenerative model, co-constructed in the dialogue between the child's action, the shaping of thought, and subsequent critical re-elaboration, both individually and in groups. This approach enables an understanding of the mechanisms and evolution of the hundred communicative and expressive languages (Malaguzzi, 1996) through any mediator, including digital ones, in relation to the characteristics of the developmental stage. Adopting a media-educational perspective, this proposal contributes to the educational project in which the school assumes the responsibility of accompanying children's growth through the implementation and progressive conceptualization of their experience of reality, and the empirical knowledge of the possibilities offered by different technologies. The heuristic experience becomes a multisensory encounter with reality, where the prepared environment, understood as a “third educator”, and the relationship with the adult mediator are central. The encounter with art is facilitated by narrative strategies, as demonstrated by the operational examples on artists (Haring, Mirò) conducted in a nursery. The article also integrates a media education perspective, promoting the creative and integrated use of digital technology to enhance expressive languages and document processes. One technique that fosters the development of multiple languages (verbal, visual, sound, and digital) is digital storytelling, which naturally lends itself, even in the preschool context, to an initial form of awareness regarding the creative use of digital media from the perspective of media literacy education (Zini et al., 2018; Ranieri, 2018; Cappello & Ranieri, 2026). From this perspective, media education adopts a logic of integration, aimed at ensuring that digital languages are mastered more effectively by both adults and children (Rivoltella, 2017). Educational services can initiate a dialogue that fosters mutual enrichment and contributes to providing increasingly meaningful experiences for children, starting from the 0-6 age group (Tisseron, 2013; Di Bari & Mariani, 2018; Cappello & Ranieri, 2026). Teaching through art takes the form of an epistemological paradigm, the aim of which is to educate children in “thinking creativity” and aesthetic sensitivity from the outset. Educational mediation emerges as an intentional practice that protects children from premature datafication and profiling while nurturing their agency, exploratory attitudes, and symbolic capacities within increasingly complex digital ecosystems (Cappello & Ranieri, 2025)

The expansion of digital technologies is redefining the socialization practices of children under six, anticipating their entry into the "platform society." This contribution presents the findings of an extensive quantitative study conducted within the framework of the PRIN 2022 Di.Co.Each. project. The research involved a robust sample of 2,041 parents and 667 ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) professionals across Italy, exploring the tension between adult perceptions, parental, technological and professional self-efficacy, and actual mediation practices. Data reveal almost universal digital accessibility: 93% of families own a smartphone and 73% a tablet. However, a significant "usage paradox" emerges: despite high availability, 65% of children aged 3-6 use these devices for less than 30 minutes daily, reflecting a mediation style often dictated by parental anxiety or restrictive gatekeeping. A key finding concerns the "regulative" use of technology: 33% of parents admit using devices primarily to manage children’s behavioral needs - such as during meals or to soothe tantrums - effectively falling into the "babysitting screen" model, where care and regulation are partially delegated to the device. Furthermore, the research highlights a systemic misalignment between home and school. While parents are often skeptical about digital tools in nurseries, fearing they might limit socialization, educators show a cautious openness towards their pedagogical potential. Crucially, the study finds that parental digital self-efficacy (the perception of being a "competent guide") is a stronger predictor of supportive mediation than technical skills alone. For professionals, the lack of specific training remains the primary barrier to integrating digital tools into a structured "critical-agency" framework.
Through the lens of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the analysis discusses how these gaps risk exposing children to premature datafication. This contribution concludes by advocating for a "pedagogical alliance" between families and ECEC services to transform digital devices from passive entertainment tools into environments for symbolic exploration, ensuring equitable digital citizenship and protecting young children’s agency.

Promoting media education is a pressing educational priority today that involves all stakeholders in the education system. Introducing it as early as preschool helps foster and facilitate dialogue among families, children, teachers, and local authorities, promoting informed, critical, and creative approaches to language, environments, and digital media at various levels.

Let’s explore these levels in greater depth by identifying action plans for promoting media education activities starting in early childhood. Due to space constraints, we will focus primarily on activities to be promoted in preschool:

1) The design and implementation by teachers of educational activities in preschool that promote the use of digital technologies and tools as available resources capable of broadening children’s horizons of knowledge and discovery. These activities are designed and tailored to the needs emerging from the classroom groups, with a view to integrating digital languages and tools in dialogue with the school curriculum, aimed at fostering active approaches, reflective practices, and critical thinking in young children. The goal is to reconceptualize digital tools and screens, transforming them from objects of desire into potential tools of knowledge in dialogue with other cognitive and communicative languages.

2) The organization of regular meetings with families to discuss and exchange views on the management and use of digital technology and screens in home and school settings, with the aim of revitalizing the school-family relationship and promoting media education within families. These meetings also facilitate participatory practices that promote mindful parenting; when cultivated from early childhood, these practices can foster the development of educational communities and virtuous, generative educational ecosystems across all school levels and grades. The meetings can also lead to the creation of documents shared among families—such as recommendations, agreements, or digital school-family contracts—designed to foster shared and participatory educational approaches within classroom groups and educational communities.

3) Periodic quantitative monitoring of digital usage habits within family settings through the administration of questionnaires. Data collection enables families and educational services to reflect on the issue and facilitates the implementation of public policies that involve educational, psycho-pedagogical, and social welfare plans and services, promoting integration with local authorities in each area (municipalities, local health authorities, consortia, social-health districts, and service areas).

The project proposal outlined here is the result of the work and initiatives carried out over the years by CED Centro Educazione Digitale A.P.S., which have made it possible to identify best practices capable of engaging all stakeholders in educational systems by promoting generative dialogic, pedagogical, and democratic processes.

In 1979, Neil Postman observed that American children spent, from 5 to 18 years old, more time in front of the television than in a classroom: about 15’000 hours against 11’500. That’s why he considered television as the first curriculum, defining it (not without concern) "the greatest pedagogical enterprise in history." Decades later, with the rise of smartphones, screen time has only increased and evolved in its consumption — raising urgent questions about how digital media actually impacts, and what role schools can play in response.

This project presents the evidence and framework of the CED – Centro Educazione Digitale, which has partnered with dozens of school communities across northern Italy, engaging more than 5000 families and students from early childhood through secondary school. Drawing on survey data about communities' digital habits and perceptions along the whole compulsory school course (0-18), the CED developed four interconnected guidelines: involving families through shared "Digital Contracts"; conducting hands-on media education workshops with students; training teachers from nursery level upward in critical digital literacy; and monitoring the phenomenon over time through quali-quantitative questionnaires.

We analyse how these guidelines were implemented across the different age groups and schools, examining what worked, where difficulties arose, and what measurable outcomes were achieved.

The findings suggest that meaningful digital education requires a whole-community approach, and that integrating digital tools as instruments of knowledge — rather than mere objects of desire — is both possible and necessary.

The proliferation of connected, voice-responsive, and algorithmically driven toys is profoundly reshaping children's earliest encounters with digital technologies. The Internet of Toys (IoToys), a subset of the broader Internet of Things, embeds data collection and platform logic into objects traditionally associated with play, care, and imaginative development (Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019). This paper presents a theoretical framework for examining the intersection of anthropomorphization, datafication, and children's digital rights within this emerging landscape (Marangi, 2026).

The anthropomorphic design of smart toys, devices engineered to simulate emotional responsiveness, personality, and conversational agency, operates as a structural mechanism that erodes children's critical distance toward data-extractive systems. When toys appear to listen, respond, and remember, the boundaries between play and surveillance dissolve in ways that children, and often their caregivers, are ill-equipped to recognize or contest (Raffaghelli, 2022). Children's digital biographies now begin well before preschool, as algorithmically driven interfaces embed platform logics into intimate family routines, generating asymmetries of power that existing regulatory frameworks have yet to adequately address.

Building on the concept of the child data citizen (Barassi, 2021), the framework situates IoToys within the governance gaps that persist despite normative advances represented by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the GDPR, and the EU Digital Services Act. Legal protection alone, however, remains insufficient. The most urgent intervention lies at the level of educational mediation and specifically in the formation of the adults who share children's earliest digital experiences: parents, early childhood educators, and teachers working in the 0–6 age range (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020).

In this perspective, the media education framework, in its most current formulation (Rivoltella, 2020), emerges not as a supplementary skill but as a foundational professional competence for all those who live or work in proximity to early childhood. Such adults must develop an ethical, not merely technical, orientation toward the digital revolution (Adamoli, 2020), and cultivate the capacity to recognize anthropomorphic design strategies, understand datafication dynamics, and engage children in age-appropriate forms of critical reflection on their relationships with connected objects (Mascheroni, 2025). This requires rethinking the very concept of digital competence in light of the transformations brought about by AI, reframing it as an increasingly relational and critical disposition (Ranieri, 2024) that encompasses the ability to decode the affective and ideological dimensions embedded in smart technologies, and to support children in developing genuine agency within, rather than mere exposure to, digital ecosystems (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2025). Such a reframing places the quality of adult-child mediation, rather than the device itself, at the center of any meaningful approach to children's digital rights.