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This contribution aims to discuss some of the possible ways to counteract the culture of gender-based hate speech, starting from secondary school civics and law courses (nowadays, the subject of academic teaching in Law Didactics) and widening the view beyond. Firstly, this analysis will address the key elements that are now most commonly associated with the explosion of hate speech in the digital domain, and its particular 'reactive' character. Secondly, on the basis of this assessment, an attempt will be made to evaluate the extent of the possible educational impact of some models of workshop activities aimed at immunising young people against such preconditions of hate speech degeneration.

This abstract presents the main features of a PhD research project which is developing in different scholastic contexts in Lombardy (Italy). Its aim is to describe the phenomenon of improvisation in teaching, namely the ability of teachers to grasp what’s in the here- and-now of children contribute and environmental situation, realizing creative connections between their original intention and what is given from the world around. This posture is fundamental whenever a pedagogical action aims to take into account children as active participants of learning process, since none of democratic teaching methodology can overlook what comes spontaneously from children and reality. The perspective of this study is to describe improvisation focalizing teachers’ bodies: their tensions, movements, gazes and locations in the space of the classroom when unforeseen elements emerge in the pedagogical relationship. Improvisation is increasingly considered an inherent part of teaching, as evidenced by a growing interest in literature in the last 20 years. The axes of research in this topic are nowadays directed towards teacher training or theoretical understandings, while there are less contributions oriented to describe what actually happens in classrooms. This lack of literature manifests the need for an understanding rooted in schools’ reality, in qualitative studies where teachers are considered active sources of knowledge. The epistemological framework of Embodied Pedagogy [1], which enhances the sense perception and the holistic participation of body, mind and emotions in educational contexts, informs this study, besides the theory of educational dispositive [3]. This study aims to enrich the understanding of the pedagogical value of the bodily presence of teachers. In order to embrace an embodied perspective towards the complex phenomenon of improvisation in teaching, I opted for a qualitative approach, expressed by an ontological position which can be considered phenomenological, and a methodology which comprehends ethnography, visual ethnography [3] and arts-based methods [4]. My axiology, lastly, entails a vision of schools as democratic and collaborative contexts. The research currently involves 5 teachers of two schools of different grades, located in two provinces in Lombardy. From a starting slot of observations for each teacher, the study entails a following phase where teachers are involved in an improvisational theatre training, where they’ll discuss their insights about their embodied participation in improvised moments in classrooms and in the training experience. Also, interviews will be performed for data triangulation. Eventually, the epoch where this study takes place opens new questions and possibilities, such as, despite the spatial and movement restrictions imposed by the pandemic, how teachers’ bodily presence is affected and how they find ways to improvise pedagogically building contexts and activities where children are protagonists. [1] Gamelli, I., Pedagogia del corpo, Cortina, Milano 2011 [2] Ferrante, A., Che cos’è un dispositivo pedagogico, Franco Angeli, Milano 2017 [3] Tobin, J., Hayashi, A., Using video for microanalysis of teachers’ embodied pedagogical practices, Research in Comparative and International Education, 10(3), pp. 326-336 [4] Mc Niff, S., Arts-Based Research, in Knowles, C.J., Cole L., Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, SAGE Publications, 2007

Social representations of the body with disabilities have for centuries been associated with the idea of illness, lack, or abnormality. The body with disabilities has been seen as a ‘monstrum’, as a malformed body, the expression of a sin and a fault; as a sick body to be rehabilitated, as an infantile body. This way of representing the «disabled body» ended up orienting both attitudes and the social treatment of disabled people, through concealment, segregation, confinement, reification within domestic or institutional contexts. At most, the disabled body is object of pietistic glances, between disturbance and curiosity. For some years now, however, we have been witnessing a redefinition of what is considered a body worthy of being shown on the public stage: models with prosthesis win beauty contests; athletes show with ease their prosthesis; war wounded pose on calendars; many films and tv series have non-standard or non-conventional protagonists, far from the western cultural norms. Is this an important cultural shift or a form of defense by the social system which incorporates the otherness in order to normalize it? This paper intends to focus attention around the social representations of disability according to the theoretical and interpretative perspective of Disability Studies. The results of this research conducted with a specific survey tool will be presented, on the basis of a sample of male and female secondary school students. The purpose of the survey is to investigate the social representations of disability held by young people, paying particular attention to the sense of justice and fairness, to dichotomous ideas of independence/dependence, care/assistance, the claim of rights/sense of pity, legitimate/illegitimate body.

The dynamic transformations of the contemporaneity affect the educational work: new needs emerge, modifying the boundaries of the educational inter-vention and the educators’ professional skills. In or-der to face complex, unpredictable and precarious situations, the educators have to become “reflective professionals”, able to recognize the different factors at the basis of the contexts where they work, and to understand them linking the theories they have learnt with the practices they have done. In so doing, they can find the best intervention for each case they are involved in. Therefore, their professionalism is rooted in balancing skills learned by experi-ence with theoretical knowledge. In this scenario, the Bachelor Degree Courses for Socio-pedagogical Educators try to provide students with interdisciplinary knowledge (from pedagogical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, philosophical disciplines) and with practical experiences, as laboratories and traineeship. This essay aims to analyse the structure, the features, as well as the perspective and critical points of the traineeship of the Bachelor Degree Course in Educational Sciences of the University of Milano – Bicocca.

In bringing digital devices to the interior of social sciences and of educational policy studies, science and technology studies are an important contribution in stressing that neither should technology be seen as something external to other social realms, nor should we think of it as the cause of social transformations. Technological developments are themselves permeated by axiological and political dimensions and inevitably related to power dynamics. Digital devices are social phenomena themselves: objects that are socially produced (MacKenzie, Wajcman, 1985; Wajcman, 2015) while contextually capable of producing the world they inhabit. In this respect, software studies are also valuable, by pointing out the need of paying attention not only to digital devices’ characteristics and the meanings they carry from the moment of their design, but also of looking into their appropriation by social actors, into the relational dynamics surrounding these objects (Kitchin, Dodge, 2011). It is specifically departing from such nondeterministic complex view of digital devices that research on this subject would find an interesting path to be developed. Departing from an empirical research we carried out in 2018 whose main results have already been published (Romito et al. 2019; De Feo et al., 2019), this short paper aims to move forward our previous analysis by deepening the theoretical and methodological grounds of our study in order to set the basis of future works in this field.