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This paper is based on a Horizon 2020 research project on the enhancement of migrant children's ability to contribute to the change of their conditions of integration in the education system in seven countries (Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading Policies of Participation, CHILD‐UP; GA 822400). The paper draws on data collected in vocational schools, with adolescents aged 14–16, in Italy. It draws on transcribed interactions to analyse activities in school classrooms in which facilitators support migrant adolescent's agency in producing narratives of their personal cultural trajectories. The paper shows how facilitators and adolescents share the rights of telling the narratives, the gender differences that become visible in the adolescents' narratives, and the ways in which facilitation supports the hybrid integration of migrant adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has caused disruptive changes across different life experiences essential to children's growth and development, including early childcare services and schools, thus threatening precious opportunities for children in early childhood to learn. The pandemic has also undermined the collaborative and alliance relationship between childcare services and families which has been widely considered an important aspect of modern services. This paper presents and discusses results from a mixed‐method exploratory study with early childcare services for children between 0 and 6 years in Italy in 2021, involving both teachers and parents, to understand experiences, educational practices put in place in childcare services, feelings, resources and risks perceived by families and teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: MEETINGDEM investigated whether the Dutch Meeting Centres Support Programme (MCSP) could be implemented in Italy, Poland, and the UK with comparable benefits. This paper reports on the impact on people living with dementia attending pilot Meeting Centres in the 3 countries.Methods: Nine pilot Meeting Centres (MCs) participated (Italy-5, Poland-2, UK-2). Effectiveness of MCSP was compared with Usual Care (UC) on outcomes measuring behavioural and psychological symptoms (NPI), depression (CSDD), and quality of life (DQoL, QOL-AD), analysed by ANCOVAs in a 6-month pre-test/post-test controlled trial.Results: Pre/post data were collected for 85 people with dementia and 93 carers (MCSP) and 74 people with dementia /carer dyads' receiving UC. MCSP showed significant positive effects for DQoL [Self-esteem (F = 4.8, P = 0.03); Positive Affect (F = 14.93, P < 0.00); Feelings of Belonging (F = 7.77, P = 0.01)] with medium and large effect sizes. Higher attendance levels correlated with greater neuropsychiatric symptom reduction (rho = 0.24, P = 0.03) and a greater increase in feelings of support (rho = 0.36, P = 0.001).Conclusions: MCSPs showed significant wellbeing and health benefits compared with UC, building on the evidence of effectiveness from the Netherlands. In addition to the previously reported successful implementation of MCSP in Italy, Poland, and the UK, these findings suggest that further international dissemination of MCSP is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all research evaluation exercises, by construction, deliver data at the level of departments and universities, not at the level of individuals. Yet, the aggregate performance is the average of the performance of individual researchers. This paper explores the issue of the relative magnitude of variability in performance within departments and between departments. It exploits anonymized data at the individual level from one of the largest research evaluation exercises, the Italian VQR 2004-2010 ( Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca). If the variability between departments were much larger than variability within departments, we would see evidence of a process of stratification, or vertical differentiation, arguably driven by competition and researcher mobility. The data show that the opposite pattern is at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]