Conference Program

In contemporary information society, characterised by rapid social changes, digitalisation has become increasingly central in educational practices. Technology is no longer merely an operational tool but constitutes a relational environment that helps shape practices of participation, collaboration, and democracy (Danby et al., 2018; Raffaghelli et al., 2025). Within this context, the dichotomy of the advantages and disadvantages of technology, particularly in the education of children aged 0 to 6, remains a subject of intense debate across the pedagogical, sociological, and psychological literature. This debate represents a significant challenge for promoting ethically responsible educational practices oriented toward children’s active participation (Livingstone, 2016).

In this scenario, video recording is still a valuable methodological tool, allowing researchers and educators to examine social interactions retrospectively and to render visible dynamics that would otherwise be difficult to document (Galliani & De Rossi, 2014; Migliarini et al., 2019). For researchers, video technologies enable a more in-depth analysis of socio-educational processes and contribute to the production of new knowledge. However, while technology can support educational work, it also raises ethical challenges that require careful consideration.

Drawing on a doctoral research project exploring peer feedback in early childhood, which develops a categorization of feedback types based on the Hattie & Timperley (2007) model, this contribution examines video-based data collection practices in preschool settings. The focus is on issues related to obtaining informed consent from school administrators, parents, and children, as well as the extent to which the presence of a camera might influence children’s behavior and the authenticity of observed interactions. Furthermore, the study highlights how video-based educational practices facilitate the systematic "listening" to children, bringing their perspectives and modes of participation to light. This listening constitutes a central element of teachers’ pedagogical planning, guiding their decisions and educational actions (UNCRC, 1989, Art. 12).

Simultaneously, this contribution emphasizes how video technologies can support reflective practices among teachers, allowing for a detailed analysis of the interactions, social dynamics, feedback types, and educational styles that shape the production and reception of peer feedback. From this perspective, video technology is conceived not only as a research tool but also as a means to make children’s experiences, forms of participation, and democratic learning visible and documentable, providing teachers with tools to observe and engage families (Mascheroni et al., 2018).

The reflections presented offer insights into the debate on educational policies regarding the use of technology in early childhood. They emphasize the need for regulations that balance the protection of children with their meaningful participation in digital experiences, in full accordance with the UNCRC (1989, Arts. 12, 13, 17). Ultimately, this contribution aims to stimulate discussion on the relationship between technology, ethics, and educational democracy in early childhood, framing technology both as an opportunity for critical reflection and methodological innovation and as a domain requiring particular responsibility, sensitivity, and attention.

Democratic education in early childhood requires a paradigm shift: from fragmented, sector-based interventions to local ecosystems capable of integrating rights, care, participation, and social justice. Within this perspective, the project Social Services and the Educational Community for Early Childhood was developed through collaboration among Save the Children, the National Foundation of Social Workers, and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, with pilot implementation in the Municipality of Bari.

The project frames childhood not as a preparatory phase, but as a political and generative space where belonging, agency, effective access to rights are shaped. Its theoretical framework is grounded in three key dimensions: the centrality of the first 1.000 days for neurobiological, emotional and relational development; the evolution of the 0–6 system toward a universal and inclusive model; evidence that early access to high-quality educational services can reduce social and cultural disadvantage. In line with Legislative Decree 65/2017 and European guidelines on inclusive Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), the research investigates a still underdeveloped issue: the role of social work in local governance and interprofessional co-design across educational, social, and health sectors.

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative participatory action-research approach. The design involves about 25 professionals from social services, third-sector organizations active in 0–6 provision, nurseries, and preschools. The training and reflective pathway – structured through online modules and in-person workshops – includes pre- and post-questionnaires, two rounds of focus groups (at the end and six months later), and in-depth interviews with social workers. The goal is to identify professional learning processes, transformations in practice, organizational challenges. Training is considered not only a pedagogical device but also an observational context for examining the emergence of shared professional language, interinstitutional trust, and the capacity to activate rights-oriented local networks for children and families.

A core axis concerns child protection and parenting support as structural levers for reducing inequality. Protection is conceived in preventive terms, emphasizing early identification of vulnerabilities (economic, relational, housing, and educational), integrated case management, and continuity during critical family transitions. Parenting support is understood as empowerment: listening, guidance, cultural and linguistic mediation, promotion of educational competencies, and facilitation of access to rights and local opportunities. From this perspective, 0–6 integration performs a concrete redistributive function by lowering material, informational, and symbolic barriers; reducing service fragmentation; strengthening trust between families and institutions; and making universalism effectively accessible, especially for the most vulnerable households.

Territorial laboratory activities – including co-construction of a Manifesto of the Educating Community, mapping of 0–6 services and spaces, and analysis of relationship quality among local actors – show how participatory practices can make informal resources, service gaps, and underserved groups visible, enabling contextualized and inclusive micro-planning.

Expected outcomes operate on three interconnected levels: professional (defining the profile of the 0–6 social worker), organizational (strengthening multi-actor governance), and pedagogical-political (consolidating educating communities as democratic infrastructures of proximity). The project ultimately proposes rethinking the relationship between education and democracy from early childhood onward by embedding protection, participation, shared responsibility, and equity as ordinary practices of social citizenship.

The AI Act, the European Regulation on Artificial Intelligence, (European Parliament, 2024), and the Guidelines for the introduction of Artificial Intelligence in Educational Institutions (MIM, 2025), published by the Ministry of Education and Merit, in August 2025, warn of the possible risks caused by AI with respect to our health, individual and collective safety and the protection of fundamental rights.

In both documents, reference is made to the biases, biases and biases that can occur «when AI integrates discriminatory attitudes towards one or more groups of people into its algorithms, in particular related to sex, race, religion, political opinions or particular personal and social conditions» (MIM, 2025, p. 10).

In childhood, biases represent a truly harmful risk: they are not just «errors of thought», but treacherous barriers to development. When a child grows up in prejudice, it crystallizes into mental patterns that condition his identity and his way of interacting with the world. AI trained on biased data can amplify stereotypes of gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status; The scenario becomes even more catastrophic when it is the algorithm itself that generates distorted and potentially harmful and dangerous outputs. The risks for children are even higher than for adults: in fact, in The Society of Transparency, the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that «everyone voluntarily surrenders himself to the panoptic gaze. One intentionally collaborates with the digital panoptic, revealing and exposing oneself» (Han 2014, p. 83). Bias thus becomes amplified discrimination due to distorted datasets that allow AI to produce social injustices (Floridi, 2022; 2025).

It is necessary to train educators and teachers so that they recognize all possible algorithmic biases: from gender bias to cultural biases, from linguistic biases to representation biases, from historical-geographical bias (Chen, 2023), which undermine the principle of justice, causing ethical, moral, social and economic damage. AI is not a neutral tool, as it reflects the values of those who programmed it and gives visibility to the social stereotypes that affect the minds and imagination of minors.

Ethical guidelines for educators on using artificial intelligence (European Commission, 2025) states how necessary it is for educators and teachers to know how to implement ethical educational-didactic design, which using inclusive datasets activate digital critical thinking education from early childhood, with the awareness that AI must be a device at the service of learning and not a tool of discrimination (Annacontini, 2023).

From an educational-didactic perspective, it is necessary to train educators and teachers in agency; learner-teacher interaction; digital literacy and responsibility and trust (Panciroli & Rivoltella, 2023, pp. 84-87), because Artificial Intelligence can be positive for the educational process and can bring about an improvement «as long as the purposes are clear and the data collections transparent» (Redaelli, 2025, p. 69).

The essay aims to demonstrate how through a series of educational strategies (Lorenzoni, 2025) and debiasing techniques (such as debate, evidence-based learning, metacognitive reflection) the impact of biases is reduced, and the mind is trained to critical, reflective, inclusive thinking that is less subject to preconceived judgments.

The transformations brought about by the digitalization of social and communicative environments require a reconsideration of the conditions that make democratic citizenship possible from early childhood. Within an ecosystem characterized by platform-mediated interactions, early public exposure, and dynamics of polarization, civic education cannot be confined to the acquisition of technical-digital skills; rather, it demands the development of critical, reflective, and relational dispositions capable of orienting action in both online and offline contexts (Biesta, 2020). In continuity with the pragmatist tradition, democracy may be understood as a situated practice of communication and cooperation (Dewey, 1916); accordingly, the school represents a crucial context for the experiential learning of such practices and for the construction of a peace-oriented society.

Within the field of peace studies, conflict assumes a formative rather than pathological value. Galtung’s (2014) reflection allows it to be interpreted not as an event to be eliminated, but as a relational process to be transformed through dialogical and creative modalities capable of overcoming oppositional rigidities and opening pathways toward shared solutions. This perspective is particularly relevant in contemporary contexts, where interactions, also digitally mediated, expose children at an early age to dynamics of confrontation, disagreement, and symbolic negotiation. Within this framework, peace education, conceived in transformative terms, does not merely address the management of problematic behaviors; rather, it promotes the capacity to interpret conflict as an opportunity for relational learning, fostering processes of mutual recognition and co-construction of meaning.

In this discourse, the construct of moral agency assumes a central role, as it clarifies how learning processes may shape self-regulation within social relationships. When such processes are supported in educational settings structured around dialogue and cooperation (Lipman, 2003; 2005), they contribute to consolidating a situated sense of responsibility that extends to digital interactions. Interpreted through an ecological perspective on agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2007), the school can become a context in which experiences of confrontation discussed, argued, and critically re-elaborated prepare children to inhabit public spaces, including online environments, as arenas of conscious participation. Building on these theoretical premises, the article presents a systematic literature review conducted according to the PICOS framework and supported by the Rayyan software, with the aim of identifying and analyzing the key variables, influencing factors, effectiveness indicators, and best practices associated with peace education pathways. This methodological choice is grounded in the need to ensure rigor, transparency, and traceability in the process of study selection and analysis, in line with methodological guidelines for systematic reviews in the field of education (Ghirotto, 2020). The analysis of empirical studies retrieved from international databases (ERIC, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO) highlights convergence around interconnected dimensions that configure peace education as a pedagogical infrastructure of citizenship. By fostering reflective and relational competences from an early age, these practices help orient digital experience toward participatory and responsible modalities, promoting subjectivities capable of inhabiting the public sphere as a space of dialogue, responsibility, and co-construction of the common good.

The paper addresses the role of education in an increasingly digital and neoliberal market-oriented society, questioning how to adapt without losing human authenticity. The evolution that has accompanied humanity for millions of years seems to have almost come to a halt with the advent of AI and digital technologies. Humanity feels a sense of misalignment. One question becomes which modalities can be adopted by the human race to make up for this supposed "delay". The problem arises in particular if AI algorithms are designed to identify quantitative efficiency standards. In this case, efficiency parameters, for example in the world of work, would be calculated abstractly by the algorithms, forcing workers to adapt without taking into account the prerogatives of the human race, which are humans’ assessment and physical and psychological limitations (De Caro). One question here arises regarding the pace and nature of evolution and adaptation of the human beings to their changing habitat. According to Stiegler - and drawing from Graham Wallas who faced the issue of the substantial impact of the Great Industrial Revolution on human society in Nineteenth century- it is possible to identify two different forms of adaptation (Stiegler). In the passive sense, adaptation requires modifying the predispositions of our species "from above." The idea is that the human species can adapt, without too much resistance, to the new demands of a changing society and its indisputable predetermined traits and ends. In our contemporary society that means adapting to the values of the market-oriented neoliberal society. Differently, in the active sense, the solution – without neglecting innovations in AI technologies- lies in modifying this environment itself to make it more suited to the prerogatives of our human species.

In light of these considerations, the two most widespread educational models today—Competences-based learning and Bildung education—are compared. I contend that the former, in its most prominent form could translate in a passive adaptation to the standards imposed by a western market- oriented society, that is, the predetermined and never questioned “values” of competition, efficiency, and agonistic attitudes. On the contrary the latter, which is the cultural education rooted in the human being, is presenting itself as a decisive element in preventing the dispersion of humanity (Marabini; Moretti Marabini). Bildung is education as a process through which individuals work out their escape from the dependent relationships in which they initially find themselves and can make their social relationships their own, also allowing to critically question values underlying our society (Jaeggi). It occurs through a guided cultural transmission of content, which fosters the development of a critical and ethical sensitivity of a humanistic nature. Therefore, I contend that an education inspired by Bildung, without denying the possibility of also developing competences and skills in parallel, can constitute a better model for human emancipation and adaptation. It is in this sense that education truly becomes a formative and critical process in the active sense of adaptation.

At the heart of the school experience lies the relationship between teaching and learning, which responds to students’ spontaneous need to explore, interpret, and understand the world around them. It is configured as a dynamic and participatory process that goes beyond the mere transmission of content, moving instead toward the active construction of meaning through experience and the conscious use of tools, including digital ones.

The progressive digitization of everyday environments has transformed patterns of social interaction and knowledge construction, involving children at increasingly early ages. In Italy, approximately one in three children between the ages of 6 and 10 (32.6%) uses a smartphone daily (ISTAT; Save the Children, 2023), prompting reflection on the educational responsibilities connected to technological mediation and the need to support children in developing critical and informed competencies. School remains one of the primary contexts in which students can acquire the essential skills required to participate fully in digital society (Vannini & McCleary, 2020). As highlighted in the National Digital School Plan, the challenge is to create the conditions for a learning process oriented toward cultural innovation and the enhancement of digital technologies, recognized as an “enabling tool, connector and driver of change” (MIUR, 2015). From this perspective, schools are called upon to configure themselves as spaces of “pedagogical connectivity” (Rivoltella, 2020), where technologies function as bridges among different actors and contribute to fostering a sense of belonging and shared participation.

Educational robotics in kindergarten and primary school assumes particular relevance. Its theoretical foundation is rooted in Papert’s constructionism, which emphasizes learning through making, in line with Dewey’s concept of learning by doing, valuing active experience and participation in knowledge construction processes. International literature highlights the potential of educational robotics in supporting disciplinary learning, fostering the development of competencies, social skills, and enhancing complex cognitive functions such as problem-solving and reasoning.

In this perspective, the experimental protocol promoted by the Observatory on Governance for Education to Cultural, Artistic and Landscape Heritage (OGEP3) of the Department of Humanities at the University of Naples Federico II involves the design of educational laboratories integrating social robots, zSpace technology, virtual reality viewers, cross-platform augmented reality applications, and holographic fans within arts-based learning pathways aimed at promoting education in cultural heritage and the languages of art.

The experimentation is structured as a study investigating the impact of integrating these devices on collaborative learning processes, levels of student engagement, and the development of cognitive and transversal skills. In line with international guidelines recognizing technological innovation as an opportunity to enhance the quality and equity of educational systems (UNESCO, 2023), the challenge is not merely to provide access to technological tools, but to build the organizational and cultural prerequisites that enable teachers to integrate them consciously into their teaching practices. The goal is to transform these tools into meaningful and sustainable learning opportunities, avoiding purely technical or reductive approaches.

Considering technologies as cognitive artifacts (Papert, 1980) within critical and contextually situated pedagogies makes it possible to promote an inclusive and participatory learning ecosystem.