Conference Program

What happens to education when the classroom begins to move?

This presentation examines itinerant learning at LiberSchool, an alternative school in Northern Italy that emerged within the intentional community of Damanhur—one of the largest intentional communities in Europe. Drawing on more than forty years of pedagogical practice, the paper explores how recurring educational journeys reshape relationships between autonomy, care, and participation in the public world.

At LiberSchool, itinerant learning refers to educational journeys integrated into the curriculum, ranging from day trips to journeys lasting up to two weeks. These experiences accompany the entire educational path of the school, typically beginning around the age of two and evolving in duration and complexity through the elementary and middle-school years. Itinerancy is therefore not an occasional activity but a recurring pedagogical practice and a defining feature of the school’s educational approach.

Traveling together transforms the class into a temporary learning community in which students and educators share responsibility for daily life and collective well-being. In this sense, itinerant education can be understood as a form of education through mobile community life. As the group moves through different places and situations, children participate in everyday decisions that shape the life of the group, learning to negotiate needs, responsibilities, and collective choices.

Within these shared journeys, educators are encountered not only as teachers but also as companions and caregivers in everyday life, while relationships among peers often deepen through cooperation and mutual support. Such experiences allow children to experiment with autonomy while remaining embedded in a relational network of care. In this sense, care is not treated as a private virtue but as a shared social practice through which collective life is sustained—echoing broader discussions on caring democracy in contemporary educational thought.

Within current debates on unschooling and home education, such practices challenge the frequent assumption that educational choices outside institutional schooling imply a withdrawal from the public sphere. In the case of LiberSchool, itinerant learning instead functions as a bridge to the public sphere: students encounter unfamiliar places, interact with people beyond their immediate community, and gradually learn to orient themselves within the complexity of shared social life.

The contribution draws on practitioner knowledge developed within the school and adopts a methodological approach based on reflective practitioner inquiry, combining autoethnographic reflection with narratives of lived educational experience. Rather than presenting itinerant learning as a model to be replicated, the paper treats LiberSchool as an empirical site through which to explore how democratic participation, autonomy, and relations of care emerge through shared movement in the world.