Conference Program

Neurodevelopmental disorders and Special Educational Needs (SEN) consist in a complex framework characterised by marked functional heterogeneity, behavioural variability, and the clinical necessity for highly personalised educational and rehabilitative approaches. Children and adolescents with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) frequently exhibit deficits in sustained attention, emotional regulation, impulse control, and social participation. Those factors negatively impact academic courses, the quality of interpersonal relationships, and overall psychophysical well-being.

Within such a scenario, music therapy proves to be a privileged pedagogical intervention strategy, capable of simultaneously activating cognitive, emotional, and relational processes due to its intrinsically accessible and integrated nature. The proposed musical activities—specifically clinical improvisation, sonorous dialogue, shared listening, and the structured use of rhythm—stimulate complex neural circuits involved in self-regulation, interpersonal synchronization, working memory, and selective attention. The non-verbal characteristic of music further facilitates the activation of alternative and spontaneous forms of communication, proving particularly effective for neurodivergent profiles.

The study analyses the impact of a research-intervention protocol consisting of eight sessions (individual or small group) conducted on a sample of ten participants, aged between 5 and 20 years, with diagnoses of SLD, ADHD, ASD, or other certified and non-certified forms of SEN. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative tools, such as assessment scales and observation grids, with qualitative instruments including the music therapist's clinical diaries, semi-structured interviews with parents, and thematic analysis of direct observations. In this paper we will present some preliminary findings.

The primary objectives aim to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment in improving attentional skills, emotional self-regulation, and social participation. Secondarily, the study investigates how improvisation and sonorous dialogue can act as catalysts for communication and cooperation. A distinctive element of this work is the inclusion of the family perspective to monitor the transferability of changes emerged in the musical setting to daily and school life. Finally, the study proposes an integrated operational model that combines music therapy, educational psychology, and special pedagogy. The intent is to expand the empirical evidence on the use of music in the psycho-educational field, offering theoretical and practical contributions for the creation of replicable, evidence-based protocols to support the development of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders.

This panel explores poetry therapy as a form of convivial and non-directive pedagogy capable of sustaining autonomy, ethical self-formation, and democratic plurality in educational contexts increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Drawing on Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Autonomy, the panel frames poetic and expressive practices as counter-hegemonic educational tools that resist epistemic homogenization, affective standardization, and predictive normalization.

The panel challenges the assumption that AI is a neutral educational tool. Instead, it conceptualizes AI as a socio-technical agency whose computational logics shape language, cognition, and emotional expression. In educational settings, the integration of generative AI raises critical questions about linguistic autonomy, authorship, and the automation of meaning-making. Poetry therapy is proposed as a pedagogical and ethical response to these challenges, offering a way to preserve human agency and creative plurality in learning.

Poetry therapy involves non-directive practices such as free writing, reflective reading, collective poem-making, and dialogical interpretation. These activities encourage learners to explore personal and collective meanings through language that resists quantification and algorithmic optimization. For example, a classroom exercise might invite students to write a poem about their experience of AI in daily life, then discuss how different metaphors reveal diverse perspectives. Another practice could involve co-creating a poem as a group, emphasizing listening, negotiation, and shared authorship rather than standardized outcomes. In university settings, reflective poetry journals can support students in articulating ethical dilemmas related to AI, data privacy, and digital surveillance.

These practices privilege ambiguity, metaphor, and narrative plurality, fostering critical awareness of both cognitive and algorithmic bias. They also strengthen learners’ capacity for reflective judgment and dialogical responsibility, as students are encouraged to interpret, challenge, and respond to each other’s expressions rather than merely producing correct answers. This aligns with Freirean notions of conscientização, where education becomes a process of critical consciousness and moral agency.

The panel further considers poetry therapy as an ethical-political pedagogy that can be integrated into institutional curricula. It discusses how schools and universities might implement poetry-based modules to support emotional literacy, resilience, and democratic participation, countering educational models focused primarily on efficiency, prediction, and control. For instance, poetry therapy can be used in teacher education programs to develop reflective practice, or in digital literacy courses to foster critical engagement with AI-generated content.

Interdisciplinary in scope, the panel brings together perspectives from philosophy of education, expressive arts therapy, critical AI studies, and media ethics. Ultimately, it asks how poetry-based pedagogies might contribute to reconfiguring AI from an apparatus of normalization into a convivial partner, capable of sustaining autonomy, plural reasoning, and non-homogenized educational experience.

This study examines the diffusion of architectural barrier removal measures in Italian school buildings over five school years, from 2020-2021 to 2024-2025, using open data collected by local authorities and made available through the Italian Ministry of Education portal. The legal framework requiring local authorities to ensure the accessibility of school buildings has been in place since Law No. 23 of 11 January 1996, yet the actual degree of compliance across the national territory has rarely been examined systematically over time.

The dataset covers individual school buildings nationwide and includes information on school type and geographic location at regional, provincial and municipal level. Each building is classified according to whether accessibility measures are in place, allowing for both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons. The analysis adopts a descriptive approach to map the distribution and temporal evolution of these measures across different school levels, from kindergarten to upper secondary education.

A core focus of the study is the identification of persistent geographic disparities, examining whether certain regions or municipalities consistently show lower rates of accessible buildings over the observation period. Differences across school types are also explored, as infrastructure characteristics and ownership arrangements may vary considerably between levels of education.

In addition, buildings with “not defined” accessibility information are explicitly incorporated into the analysis. Rather than being excluded as simple missing data, their non-response is considered analytically relevant, especially given its concentration in specific segments of the school building stock, thereby enriching the overall national picture.

Results describe how the share of accessible buildings has evolved over time, which school types and regions lag furthest behind, and where data coverage remains incomplete, offering a systematic overview of a dimension of school infrastructure that is central to inclusive education.

Democracy requires that all voices possess citizenship. Yet, in the field of mental health, since the 17th century, medical knowledge has held an interpretive monopoly over the social experience of mental distress (Foucault, 1961; Goffman, 1961). This proposal analyzes how the figures of bloggers who disclose their mental health status on social media platforms break this hegemony, positioning themselves as "experts by experience" (Rose, 1996; 1999), capable of restoring cognitive and transformative value to subjective lived experience. In these spaces of “democracy of learning” (Freire, 1970), the individual transits from object (“clinical case”) to narrating subject through processes of subjectivation (Dubet, 1994; Rose, 1999) and new forms of democratic citizenship, passing through the effects of digitalization on mental health (Illouz, 2012).

Integrating the Re-figuration of Space (Löw, 2001; 2022), the Sociology of Experience (Dubet, 1994), and the Politics of Subjectivation (Rose, 1996; 1999), the contribute explores how users practice active citizenship by reclaiming their experience, conquering their own spaces of listening and representation, and partially redefining treatment practices. The empirical research, based on a digital ethnography of 70 social profiles and 30 in-depth interviews, examines how the tactics of social actors intersect with institutional strategies (de Certeau, 1980), focusing on the co-production of knowledge and affective practices (Slaby & von Scheve, 2019). This research highlights, therefore, how media self-exposure is not merely an empowerment strategy, but a practice of knowledge production that challenges stigma, transforming digital technologies into tools for emancipation and the restoration of agency (Rebughini, 2014). In conclusion, the study investigates the transformation of the psychiatric patient into a digital narrating subject, analyzing how self-narration on social media configures, emphasizing the valorization of subjective voices as essential partners in the design of clinical services and the fight against discrimination.

In recent decades, disability studies have emphasised that disability cannot be understood merely as an individual condition, but as the outcome of social, institutional, and cultural factors that produce inequality (Medeghini, 2015). From this perspective, people with disabilities can be considered a social group subject to structural oppression (Thomas, 2007; 2024), generated by systems of beliefs, practices, and institutions that implicitly define who is fully entitled to social participation (Allen, 2005). As Campbell (2009) argues, these processes are underpinned by ableism: norms and expectations that construct an implicit ideal of ability and productivity.

These tensions are particularly evident in the transition from school to work for students with disabilities. They emerge through classification systems, organisational practices, and institutional expectations that structure educational trajectories in differential ways (Friso, 2017). Although inclusion policies have broadened access to education, the transition to adulthood and entry into the labour market remains one of the most vulnerable stages and among the least investigated by research (Traina et al., 2022). In this context, the Pathways for Transversal Skills and Guidance (PCTO) were introduced into the Italian school system to promote situated learning experiences and vocational guidance. However, recent studies (Pagani et al., 2025) highlight that their educational value depends on the quality of host contexts, student engagement, and the role of stakeholders shaping learning experiences.

This report presents preliminary results of an action research project conducted within “PCTO: a support system for students with disabilities”, implemented in the Milan metropolitan area and promoted within the EMERGO programme. The project aims to support school-to-work transition processes for young people with disabilities through guidance and mediation between schools, families, and workplaces. The research investigates how work placement experiences during upper secondary school contribute to the development of life projects and future expectations among students with disabilities (Tino & Ruzzante, 2016), and which conditions facilitate or hinder the educational potential of PCTO. The study was conducted at the Milan branch of the Enaip Foundation.

The research design adopts a qualitative approach based on narrative and semi-structured interviews with students with disabilities, parents, educators, curricular and special education teachers, and school representatives for inclusion and PCTO. Including multiple perspectives enables identification of convergences and dissonances between experiences, supporting data triangulation that enriches understanding of educational processes and relational dynamics. Data are analysed through reflective-interpretative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), aimed at identifying emerging patterns, shared meanings, and interpretative differences among participants.

Preliminary findings show that PCTOs can represent meaningful contexts of learning and recognition, where students experience participation and skill development difficult to achieve in traditional school settings. At the same time, the analysis highlights challenges related to the discontinuity of experiences, the quality of work contexts, and the need for mediation between schools, families, companies, and local services. Overall, these results suggest that the inclusive potential of PCTOs lies not simply in access to work experience, but in the possibility of creating relational learning contexts capable of redefining participation and supporting transitions to adult life.

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