Conference Program

Within the framework of its Academic Freedom in Action project, the Council of Europe has expressed the ambition to “protect and promote the values of academic freedom, ensuring that higher education remains a stronghold of democracy and critical thinking.” From this perspective, the mission of universities can no longer be limited to the production and transmission of knowledge. It also includes the development of critical skills among both staff and students. These skills enable them to assess the validity of arguments and information.

However, these critical skills do not appear to be evenly distributed across academic disciplines. A survey published by the Jean Jaurès Foundation in 2023 (Kraus & al. 2023) shows that adherence to misinformation varies according to students’ field of study: students in Health and Law appear more likely to endorse false information than those enrolled in the Social Sciences and Humanities or in the Arts. Based on this observation, we formulate the general hypothesis that disciplinary affiliations shape differentiated relationships to knowledge, which are more or less conducive to the development of critical thinking skills.

This raises the question of which factors are most decisive in fostering critical thinking skills. Do differences arise from students’ ways of learning, such as a more instrumental relationship to knowledge or the use of rote learning? Or do they depend more on assessment practices, which may encourage specific relationships to knowledge (Abrami et al., 2015)? Beyond individual learning practices, do disciplinary contexts matter, for instance through the degree of consensus about what counts as legitimate knowledge, the place given to epistemology in curricula, or the historical development of disciplines (Millet, 2003; Bernstein, 1971; Shay, 2016)? Finally, how do major sociological variables such as gender and social background shape these processes (Renisio, 2015) ?

Drawing on a questionnaire survey conducted with 2,000 students at the University of Nantes, aimed at measuring their degree of adherence to misinformation and collecting data on their ways of learning and accessing information, as well as twelve collective interviews carried out with students grouped by discipline focusing on their relationships to their field of study and to the knowledge transmitted within it, this paper analyses the factors most likely to influence adherence to or resistance against misinformation. Based on these findings, it outlines possible avenues for action to strengthen the development of critical thinking skills in the university of tomorrow

The abstract was intended for panel M16, but it does not appear in the list of selectable panels, so I selected panel M07

In contemporary onlife environments (Floridi, 2015), where digital and material dimensions of experience are increasingly intertwined, online hate speech has become a pervasive and structural feature of social media communication. This article examines the phenomenon not through the traditional focus on perpetrators or victims, but through the lens of digital spectatorship, a position marked by visibility, emotional exposure and frequent passivity. Drawing on media education theory and a realistic evaluation framework (Pawson & Tilley, 1997; Pawson, 2006), the study investigates how users observe, interpret and respond to discriminatory discourse targeting bodies, identities and subjectivities that deviate from dominant norms.

The empirical research, developed within the PRIN 2022 project Theories, Philosophies and Politics of Bodies in Network-Connected Digital Universes, combines an evaluative survey with an expert-based Nominal Group Technique. Findings indicate high exposure to hate speech, but despite this pervasive presence, spectators predominantly adopt non-interventionist attitudes. These behaviours reflect the bystander effect in digital contexts (Latané & Darley, 1970; Markey, 2000) and are reinforced by mechanisms of moral disengagement (Bandura, 1996).

The NGT phase highlights the need for multi-level interventions integrating individual, community and educational approaches. Experts emphasise the importance of training users to recognise subtle hostility, fostering collective moderation practices and embedding media education modules within schools and public institutions. The findings underscore that countering online hate speech requires moving beyond regulatory or punitive strategies: it demands an educational paradigm centred on critical media literacy (Kellner & Share, 2007), emotional awareness, responsibility and active digital citizenship (Bornatici, 2017; Perfetti, 2020).

Overall, the study argues that spectatorship represents both a vulnerability and a potential resource for democratic participation. Enhancing media competence and socio-emotional skills is essential for transforming passive witnessing into prosocial engagement (Rivoltella & Ardizzone, 2007) and for promoting inclusive digital public spaces capable of resisting normalised patterns of symbolic violence.

Accessing information has never been easier than it is nowadays (Wineburg & McGrew, 2016). However, accessing the tools to critically evaluate and analyze information is not as simple. Never before have young students been so exposed to misinformation, fake news, subtle and captivating reporting, and misleading news. Constantly bombarded by rushed and often conflicting news, it is difficult to independently develop the skills needed for informed and critical reading. But schools and education can contrast this phenomenon: subjects such as mathematics and computer science can be used as training to recreate new mental habits (Carrisi et al., 2025) in the democratic citizens of the future. For this reason, we felt it was essential to develop an educational kit for primary and lower secondary schools in data literacy (Wolff et al., 2016). The kit was developed within the broader framework of the Scuola di Cittadinanza Europea, a civic education platform created by the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to support civic education pathways in secondary schools. The project aims to be a large space of knowledge and participatory teaching, as well as a pathway of awareness and reflection on contemporary challenges, grounded in the growing conviction that education is one of the most relevant factors in improving quality of life in contemporary society. The kit offers an 8-hour modular pathway in data literacy structured around five key steps: understanding what data are, distinguishing data from information, collecting data, reading data, and representing data. Through historical case studies (from the Lebombo bone to Florence Nightingale’s polar diagram and early computers), hands-on laboratories (building an Inca quipu), real-world data collection tasks, and guided analysis of media articles and graphs, students are progressively trained to question sources, recognise bias, interpret statistical representations and reflect on how data can shape narratives. By combining mathematical tools such as statistics, probability, data classification and graphical representation with activities in history, language and technology, the kit promotes an integrated and inquiry-based approach to learning. Seven years after the launch of the broader project, a research process was conducted to evaluate and update both the data literacy kit and the pedagogical methodologies underpinning the entire Scuola di Cittadinanza Europea initiative, with the aim of providing teachers with more flexible and inclusive materials, suited to an increasingly diverse student population. Through teacher feedback, classroom experimentation, and revision of instructional materials, the project refined its didactic strategies and updated guidance resources in response to evolving media environments and educational transformations. Enabling students to independently assess the information they encounter daily becomes a powerful tool in fostering critical news literacy, with the ultimate goal of training active, informed, and reflective European citizens.

Of the many educational challenges we face today, the expansion of digitalisation processes is certainly one of the most controversial. It redefines the concept of ‘emergency’ as both an emerging phenomenon and an event requiring prompt intervention.

Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the critical issue is not the result of digitalisation itself, but, rather, the absence of adequate media literacy. This is crucial in guiding the conscious use of technologies and mitigating the risk of misinformation among educators and students.

According to the AGCOM report Media and Digital Literacy in Italy (2025), over 64.6% of the Italian population has low or insufficient digital and media skills, and around 8 out of 10 Italians are exposed to online risks, including hate speech, misinformation, and fake news. In line with this evidence, UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy: Policy and Strategy Guidelines (2025) recommends formal and non-formal educational interventions aimed at developing critical and practical skills in the use of media and information.

Based on this premise, this paper introduces the Teachers 4.0 Digital Age Curriculum as a tool for initial and ongoing training for teachers and educators across Europe. Structured into ten modules, the curriculum offers a wide range of digital literacy activities alongside corresponding assessment tools. Addressing complex phenomena such as filter bubbles, deepfakes and manipulative online campaigns, it provides educators with the practical tools and theoretical frameworks needed to evaluate source reliability and integrate media literacy into everyday school activities. Particular attention is given to creating safe and inclusive learning environments that respect diversity.

In this way, the Teachers 4.0 Digital Age Curriculum serves as a training tool for acquiring media literacy skills, as well as a preventive instrument against misinformation. It aims to educate digital citizens who are aware of their responsibilities and capable of navigating an increasingly complex information ecosystem. In doing so, it contributes to the development of resilient and informed school communities.

This article intervenes in current debates on critical digital literacy, joining concerns about the lack of a solid conceptualization to sustain both scholarly inquiry and educational intervention (Garavaglia & Petti 2025, Pangrazio 2016). While media education and digital literacy seem to be key topics of current educational policy agendas, existing frameworks in both fields remain rooted in a print-centered understanding of literacy. This view relies on a narrow and anthropocentric logic that suppresses the diversity of resources for meaning-making (Campbell & Olteanu 2024). Within this paradigm, students are reduced either to masters of technological tools or victims of media manipulation (Buckingham 2020), and literacy is flattened into a set of quantifiable and standardized competencies.

Building on this, in this article we repurpose the idea of critical digital literacy through the lens of postdigital approaches (Jandric 2019): this combination is aimed to enable a more nuanced, non-dichotomic and non-reductionist understanding of critical digital literacy (or literacies), attentive to the multiple materialities, forces and agencies entangled in sociodigital encounters. To further this discussion, this article engages with our experience in designing, implementing, and reflecting on a series of media education workshops taking place from March to April 2025 and involving six schools. Each workshop, organized as part of a programme for the promotion of pedagogical innovation, brought together a group of students from the third year of a low-secondary school and one from the first year of high-secondary school. The workshops unfolded in two phases: a critical analysis of a social media platform, carried out through guided navigation; a creative, artistic phase of reimagination, in which students were invited to materially reimagine the platform using the collage technique.

Methodologically, therefore, our work unpacks into two interrelated stages: the art-based classroom activity, and an experiment in sociological fictional writing, through which we reassembled the data collected in two fictional vignettes (Hrastinski 2025). Our choice to rely on these methods is consistent with our theoretical stance: in a sector increasingly subject to intensive datafication, and where data that count are those that can be easily counted, art-based research introduces generative frictions in data production processes, while fictional writing surfaces latent or overlooked dimensions, enabling the creation of our own ‘data lives’ (Kitchin 2021).

After presenting the fictions, we will discuss the workshops as entry points to rethink critical digital literacy from a postdigital perspective, framing them as occasions to enact third spaces of education, which we understand as sites open to multiple forms of negotiation, discovery and play, particularly suited to enable generative forms of engagement with new media and related literacies (McDougall et al. 2018). Drawing on the workshops, we reconceptualize literacy as inevitably intertwined with agency (Code 2025, Jiang et al. 2024), and describe this twofold articulation as: i) a programmatic process of defamiliarization of digital practices, spaces and actants, often internalized and taken for granted; and ii) a strategic act of reimagination and creative speculation, aimed at reclaiming spaces of assertion, refusal and negotiation within technological interfaces, functions, and algorithmic processes.