Conference Program

Democratic education is not only a matter of transmitting civic knowledge but of cultivating the habits and dispositions that make pluralistic life possible: listening, justifying, disagreeing, and revising one’s views in public (Dewey; 1916). Yet, as schooling is increasingly managed through performative logics and risk-avoidance, opportunities for democratic subjectification can shrink, even when “citizenship” remains a curricular label (Biesta; 2006; Biesta; 2013). Classroom discussion of controversial issues (CIs) has long been proposed as a key practice for democratic learning (Stradling, Noctor, & Baines; 1984; Hess; 2009; Hess & McAvoy; 2015), but it is also a site where teachers’ vulnerability, neutrality dilemmas, and institutional pressures become visible (Journell; 2017; Cassar et al.; 2021).

In the digital age, these tensions are amplified. Episodes of school violence travel quickly through news platforms, messaging apps, and algorithmic feeds, often framed through sensationalism and polarisation. Teachers meet these events “already interpreted” by media and peer talk, and must decide whether they belong to the educational mandate or should be treated as external safety matters. Research on unplanned controversial issues highlights how such moments can throw “the classroom in turmoil,” requiring rapid professional judgement shaped by emotions, prior experiences, and task perception (Cassar et al.; 2021; Cassar et al.; 2023). At the same time, recent debate cautions against removing emotions from civic discussion too quickly, arguing that political emotions may be educational resources rather than mere risks (Surina; 2025).

This paper presents an ongoing multi-regional Italian study (upper secondary level) that investigates whether – and under which conditions – teachers perceive school violence as a CI that calls for educational intervention, or as a matter to be delegated beyond schooling. The project currently relies on a single-phase data collection built as a mixed-method questionnaire. The instrument combines (1) a short narrative from real media scenario about a violent episode entering school, designed to anchor responses in concrete; (2) an elicitation task where participants formulate a spontaneous question prompted by the situation; and (3) a set of Likert-scale items and open questions aligned with key CI dimensions (epistemic, political, emotional, and professional) (Hand; 2008; Hess; 2009).

Analytically, the study integrates quantitative and qualitative strands: Likert data are used to identify response patterns and teacher positioning profiles, while the written component undergoes thematic and discursive coding to capture boundary-work, justificatory repertoires, and silences. This written approach offers some advantages, like privacy, reduced group dynamics, and traceable texts, but also limitations: brevity, self-presentation, and the absence of dialogic probing that can surface implicit assumptions. Survey data will be collected in Spring 2026 and analysed through a convergent mixed-method design to inform future research and teacher education on democratic deliberation in digitally mediated school controversies.

In the contemporary context, marked by technological acceleration, hyperconnectivity, and the transformation of learning environments, the relationship between education and teaching is being profoundly redefined (Castells, 2010; Floridi, 2014). Schools are increasingly called upon to address controversial issues emerging within the digital sphere, where media practices shape identities and relationships. Within this scenario, the contribution proposes a reflection on the role of socio-educational cooperatives as strategic partners in building educational alliances capable of supporting schools in addressing such complexities.

The widespread diffusion of digital media and their pervasiveness in young people’s daily lives generate new educational challenges: mediated relational dynamics, conflicts, disinformation, polarization, and vulnerability. These phenomena are not merely matters of “digital education”; rather, they question the educational mission of schools, which are called upon to foster critical and democratic competences within a constantly evolving communicative ecosystem.

This contribution takes as its point of observation the experience of Coop. Bangherang, engaged in the implementation of non-formal educational pathways in both school and extracurricular contexts. Through the analysis of selected projects, the paper highlights how the action of socio-educational cooperatives can strengthen the school ecosystem by offering methodologies, languages, and learning settings capable of addressing emerging needs.

In line with the Council of Europe’s recommendations on teaching controversial issues and fostering democratic culture (Council of Europe, 2016), the contribution focuses on three key functions. The first is educational mediation: cooperatives act as bridging actors between schools, local communities, and families, fostering the creation of spaces for dialogue. The second is methodological innovation: non-formal pathways make it possible to address controversial issues, transforming complexity into opportunities for learning. The third is the promotion of democratic competences: the digital sphere is understood not as a separate domain, but as a space in which practices of citizenship are exercised on a daily basis.

The underlying hypothesis is that socio-educational cooperatives can contribute to the development of a school capable of “inhabiting” digital transformations without reducing them to emergencies, but rather recognizing them as central educational terrain. Through the discussion of the cases, the contribution seeks to offer theoretical and methodological reflections on the role of the third sector in constructing shared educational practices in the digital age.

Case Studies:

Reading the World: A primary school project dedicated to critical information literacy, the development of critical thinking, and the recognition of disinformation. It integrates digital outputs, thematic board games, and the involvement of a youth-oriented editorial team designed for the target group.

Generation Online: A lower secondary school pathway addressing gaming and video games. It analyzes common game mechanics, with particular attention to those that influence behavior, and guides students in designing their own video game in order to enhance awareness and critical capacity.

Financial Education: A project for upper secondary schools, developed in collaboration with a banking institution. Through thematic board games and dedicated simulations, it explores issues such as debt, risk, and misleading promises of profit conveyed by apps and online influencers.

Some research tends to portray adolescents as inexperienced and vulnerable navigators of the cyberworld. Our research, however, proposes the perspective of agency to understand the factors that cause adolescents to trust others despite having no direct knowledge of them (Krabbendam et al., 2024). We know that early interactions of trust during childhood form the basis for subsequent interactions of trust with peers and strangers (Erikson, 1963; Stolle, 2002): the attachment and trust experienced in parent-child relationships translate and can be modified by subsequent social experience during childhood and adolescence (Rotenberg et al., 2005). What do we trust in friendship? In symmetrical interpersonal relationships, trust is built purely on emotions (Đorđević, 2025); initial trust is the first indicator of the level of trustworthiness confirmed by other people, whether known or unknown, and signals a desire to engage in potentially mutually beneficial interactions (Krabbendam et al., 2024). Not many studies explore the trust building in everyday contexts, which nowadays fully include cyberspace (Brunori & Pediconi, 2025; Pediconi & Brunori, 2019, 2021; Pediconi et al., 2024).

The present research sheds light on characteristics in developing trust in adolescents' online social interactions. Our research involved 99 adolescents (24 males and 75 females) attending the second year of high school in two schools in central Italy. Participants were asked to draw an imaginary Instagram profile of a user with which it can be easy to exchange friendship, to fill a chat conversation with this imaginary user and to describe both the photo-profile and posts included within his/her profile. Qualitative research using visual methods opens up new perspectives on complex phenomena (Agha et al., 2024; LaMarre & Chamberlain, 2022), allows to “materialize bodies, social practices, and interactions between individuals and structures” useful for studying social experience (MacIsaac 2021, p. 1). The results reveal an identikit of the trusted digital other, based on the exploration of otherness through gender, name, biography, profile photo and chat exchanges.

Our adolescents showed a willingness to imagine trusted peers of either gender who would have no problem revealing their first and last names, with a personal photo; they reveal their place of residence or school, ready to meet others in person to share common interests and positive qualities. Young people want to know who they are dealing with; this digital friend is described as helpful, outgoing and transparent teenager who is as authentic as a favourite friend in the offline world. This model of digital otherness is based on offline friendships, revealing a certain caution and prudence on the part of adolescents when they encounter the digital world (Kelly & Burkell, 2025). These personal resources should be utilised as an experiential evaluative dimension in the construction of digital policies and pedagogical strategies. Formal and informal educational settings are places where trust and democratic engagement are closely linked and mutually reinforcing. Strategic actions in these settings can strongly support teenagers' sense of agency, fostering resilience against the polarisation of the digital ecosystem.

Contemporary classrooms have become digitally mediated spaces in which digital technologies shape communication practices, structure information flows, and influence the narratives that emerge in everyday classroom interactions (Soriani, 2019). Within this environment, unplanned controversial moments are also frequently mediated by digital technologies, not necessarily as explicit topics of study but as conditions through which classroom polarisation emerges (Just, 2025; Van Alstein, 2019). Although the digital may appear to take centre stage in such situations, the tensions that surface are not reducible to technological questions alone. This paper examines how the digital becomes implicated in these moments and how teachers interpret and justify their decision to actively engage or distance themselves from it.

The analysis draws on a small number of illustrative cases from a wider qualitative study in which teachers reflected on why they chose to address unplanned controversial incidents. The digital dimension was not pre-specified in the original data collection but emerged naturally within teachers’ narratives. The focus here is on how these situations surfaced through digital environments, how teachers framed the challenges that followed and how they justified their decisions to act.

Across the cases, the digital appeared in distinct ways: as an object of epistemic debate when students questioned whether the internet could replace teachers; as a source and amplifier of cultural content and values in discussions of online influencers; as a contextual trigger surfacing latent prejudice during an online safety lesson; and as a relational medium through which peer conflict travelled across the boundary between online communication and school life. Teachers responded differently. Some treated these situations as pedagogical and moral opportunities for dialogue, critical scrutiny, and boundary setting, while others delegated responsibility to institutional structures. Teachers’ justifications drew on concerns including protecting students from harm, setting moral boundaries around discriminatory or exclusionary views, challenging prejudice and stereotyping, fostering critical and democratic engagement, and upholding the legitimacy and limits of professional responsibility.

The paper argues that while digital technologies can mediate the way controversial issues arise in classrooms, they do not fundamentally transform the decision teachers must make in the moment: whether to take up the issue directly or to limit their engagement with it. Rather, digitally mediated controversies reconfigure the context, visibility, and perceived jurisdiction of the issue, even as the fundamental decision teachers must make in the moment remains the same. Such a decision extends beyond the digital to include the teacher’s past and a desired future, unfolding in a specific context that is often emotionally charged. The teacher’s decision is also anchored in fundamental questions related to the purpose of education and who the person in teaching is (Cassar et al., 2023; Kelchtermans, 2009). The cases suggest that teachers’ decisions to address or delimit these issues are never neutral (Hess & McAvoy, 2015). They communicate implicit messages to students about what counts as legitimate knowledge, whose dignity is protected, how conflict is handled, and where professional responsibility begins and ends (Cooper Geller, 2020; Dabach, 2015).

Especially since the 2016 US election campaign that culminated in the first election of Donald Trump, memes (Molina, 2020) have increasingly been used by the American alt-right as tools of xenophobic, racist, and misogynist propaganda (Nagel, 2017). Over the past decade, what can be defined as “memetic hate speech” has progressively consolidated as a strategic component of digital political communication, particularly among nationalist and populist movements across different geopolitical contexts. Memes, due to their hybrid nature—simultaneously humorous, ironic, and highly shareable—enable the normalization of extremist discourses through ambiguity, plausible deniability, and participatory remix cultures (Trillò & Shifman, 2021; Schmid et al., 2025). Their algorithmic compatibility with platform logics further amplifies their circulation, contributing to the mainstreaming of radical narratives (Whittaker et al., 2021).

Starting from this scenario, this contribute first examines the processes of transculturation and indigenization of memetic hate speech, tracing how communicative strategies initially developed within the M.A.G.A. movement in the United States have been recontextualized, adapted, and localized by identity-based political movements in various European countries. Particular attention will be paid to the semiotic transformations, narrative reframing, and visual vernaculars that enable such content to resonate within specific national contexts, while maintaining a recognizable transnational ideological matrix. In doing so, the study situates memetic hate speech within broader dynamics of digital populism, affective polarization, and platformed political participation.

Secondly, the issue of hateful memeing will be addressed from a media education perspective (Buckingham, 2020), arguing that the pedagogical response to this phenomenon must move beyond simplistic models of content moderation or fact-checking. Instead, it requires the development of critical interpretative competencies capable of unpacking the rhetorical strategies, intertextual references, and affective appeals embedded in memetic communication. In this regard, a set of Memetic Literacy Frameworks (e.g., Harvey & Palese, 2018; Pather & Crovitz, 2023; Rice, 2023) will be presented and comparatively discussed. These frameworks conceptualize memes not merely as humorous artifacts, but as culturally situated, multimodal texts that demand specific analytical skills.

This contribution aims to highlight both the pedagogical potentials and the possible limitations of such frameworks in guiding classroom practices aimed at preventing hate speech in contemporary societies. On the one hand, memetic literacy can foster critical awareness of digital rhetoric, participatory culture, and the socio-political implications of remix practices. On the other hand, challenges emerge in terms of teachers’ preparedness, institutional constraints, and the risk of inadvertently reproducing harmful content in educational settings. Ultimately, the contribution seeks to position media education as a key arena for democratic resilience, proposing a critical and reflexive approach to memetic culture as an urgent task in the current media ecosystem.

In this era of global interconnectedness and unpredictability, education must equip students to become engaged, globally competent citizens who can navigate complex controversial problems, e.g., migration, climate change, wars, polarisation, racism and extremism (OECD, 2018) and even the use of AI. EFL teacher education has a unique role to play here: pre-service teachers must not only develop the skills to facilitate difficult discussions themselves, but also be prepared to nurture their students' social-emotional and critical thinking skills in the process. Yet there is a dearth of research on incorporating controversial issues into EFL teacher education and preparing pre-service teachers for such discussions, especially in the Hungarian context (Divéki, 2024).

Incorporating controversial topics into the EFL curriculum has numerous benefits; through debates and discussions, students can develop their language, citizenship, and social-emotional skills (Pereszlényi & Divéki, 2024). AI tools have the potential to support this process in meaningful ways. AI chatbots can provide students with opportunities for meaningful interaction, personalised learning, individualised feedback, and a low-pressure environment for practice (Pesovski et al., 2024; Rebolledo Font de la Vall & González Araya, 2023). By providing information and facilitating the generation of arguments and counterarguments, AI can encourage students to engage with complex, controversial topics and develop a deeper understanding of the issues and their own stances. These tools also offer interactive, student-centred activities, such as simulated discussions, debates and role-plays (Shazly, 2020), which allow students to practice expressing their thoughts in a mature, nuanced and confident manner. In teacher education specifically, these affordances can be particularly valuable, offering pre-service teachers unique opportunities to practice challenging discussions in a controlled, low-stakes environment.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of AI tools in facilitating discussions about controversial issues with pre-service EFL teachers, examining both their pedagogical potential for developing trainees' speaking and social-emotional skills and their perceptions of AI-powered discussions. Using a case study design, a semester-long study was conducted with a group of pre-service EFL teachers (N=16) in a language skills development seminar at a Hungarian university. Each week, the students engaged with different AI tools while addressing controversial topics through interactive student-centred activities (e.g., role-plays, debates, organised discussions). Data was collected through reflective journals, beginning and end-of-semester surveys, class discussion feedback sheets, student reflections, and semi-structured interviews (n=5).

The findings indicate that AI-powered discussions enhanced students' confidence in addressing controversial topics. Particularly noteworthy was the role of AI in supporting argument construction for more demanding debates and role-play activities and in developing students' critical thinking and AI-literacy skills. Nonetheless, while students found the tools useful for preparing for discussions, they expressed ambiguous feelings about the use of AI in class, raising questions about perceived authenticity and the role of human interaction in meaningful discussion practice.

The implications of this study point to the need for systematic integration of AI tools in teacher education programmes, alongside the development of targeted materials and guidelines for using AI to facilitate difficult discussions in the EFL context.