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Care leavers are young people who have grown up in the care system, either in foster care or in residential care homes in transition from care to adulthood. They are a vulnerable group, with a high risk of negative outcomes such as poor mental health. The development of agency and the promotion of well-being are two of the most important aspects of the psychological and educational intervention with care leavers. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the relationship between agency and well-being in a group of care leavers (N = 48) recruited from the alternative care services offered by the cities of Florence and Prato and involved in the Caring project. The study employed the World Health Organization's Well-Being Index (WHO-5), Participation in Decision Making Scale and Schneider's Agency Scale as quantitative sources of data. The data were analyzed using structural equation modelling controlled for demographic data. The findings show that participation in decision making fully mediated the positive association between dispositional agency and well-being. The conclusions are discussed in terms of integrated practical recommendations for professionals concerned with care leaver protection and the development of psychological and educational interventions.

The paper presents and discusses data from a qualitative study carried out in April and May 2020 with families under lockdown in Italy (N = 319) and Greece (N = 297). The research examined how confinement and restrictions on movement had impacted families’ everyday geographies (with a particular focus on ‘liminal’ places located between homes and public spaces, such as balconies, hallways, courtyards, backyards), as well as parents’ most valued public spaces and propensity (and modes) to use them. Data were analysed following a top-down thematic approach. The results suggest that restricted access to public spaces (as enforced during the Greek and Italian lockdowns) may influence the signification of domestic places, prompt remodulation of the dialectic between public and private spheres, and bring to light the social value of families’ (parents and children’s) experiences in public spaces.

L'articolo propone una riflessione sull'importanza di tornare ad occuparsi di diritti delle bambine e dei bambini a 14 anni dalla firma della Convenzione sui diritti dell'infanzia e dell'adolescenza

La partecipazione delle giovani generazioni è, oggi, al centro delle politiche internazionali, che diffusa-mente sottolineano il ruolo fondamentale delle nuove generazioni per lo sviluppo di società più giustee sostenibili. Al tempo stesso, però, da più parti vengono descritti processi di apparente disaffezionedai processi democratici più tradizionali da parte dei più giovani, i quali sembrano alla ricerca di formedi partecipazione alternative. La riflessione qui proposta è volta ad interrogare le forme di partecipazio-ne dei giovani, proponendo di considerarle come risorsa per la formazione diffusa della società, nellaprospettiva di una pedagogia pubblica (Biesta, 2012), suggerendo alle istituzioni di lasciarsi interroga-re da quanto sta avvenendo., The importance of youth participation is underlined by international policies, which widely stress youth’s fundamental role in developing more just and sustainable societies. At the same time, dis-affection from the more traditional democratic processes is registered by young people, who instead seem to be looking for forms of expression of a different nature. This paper aims to question the forms of participation of young people, offering to consider them as resources for the broader society within the perspective of public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012), suggesting that the institutions let themselves be informed by what is happening.

Il capitolo traccia alcune piste di approfondimento che possono mettere in luce il contributo delle pratiche educative nella fascia 0-6 anni a un approccio basato sui diritti e, viceversa, il contributo che un approccio basato sui diritti può offrire all'educare 0-6.

Arts-based approaches and languages are valuable resources for the field of education, with the potential to enhance both educational work [10] and educational research [2]. In educational research specifically, Arts-Based Research Methods (ABR) [1], [3] – understood here as a range of approaches that recognize the artistic process itself as a mode of inquiry – may usefully be adopted alongside or in combination with other research methodologies. However, implementing such approaches requires specific competence in both art-based languages and research methods. In this paper, we present a project entitled the Arts-based Research-Global Classroom, a training course designed to provide PhD students and early career researchers with the knowledge and skills they need to deploy ABR methods in educational settings. The course is jointly delivered by the University of Milan-Bicocca and Drexel University, Florida. The concept is that of a learning laboratory, where students are given the opportunity to critically and reflectively discuss and evaluate perspectives, philosophical positions, and research questions that can lead to the design of collaborative research projects using art-based research methods. The course takes place over eight monthly sessions, each lasting around three hours. Part of the sessions takes the form of workshops based on artistic practices such as collage, assemblage, dance, drawing, and small group work.

This paper describes a dynamic multistage game in which sustainability is a value that is shared between companies and stakeholders in a competitive market. The game solution could move from a Nash equilibrium to a higher equilibrium, the MES equilibrium, because of the presence of stakeholders who influence the choice and the set of sustainable strategies. Stakeholders provide feedback to companies (by way of awards, ratings, rankings, rebukes, etc.) at every stage of the game. Positive feedback gives a company the chance to expand its business opportunities, leveraging on good reputation, customer loyalty, operational risk mitigation, resilience, employees' cohesion, etc. The interaction between companies and stakeholders also allows companies to seize market opportunities (e.g., supplying sustainable products for responsible customers, sustainable investments for investors, etc.). The sustainability game demonstrates how sustainability can engage the economic system in a market shift.

The United Nations Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) expanded the epistemological and methodological debate on sustainability and education. Currently, ESD encompasses a broad spectrum of socio-political issues (including global citizenship and social justice), while “place-bonding” is seen as key to fostering citizen advocacy in local communities and enhancing “children’s lived experiences of local issues”. Herein, we emphasize both the political and the pedagogical value of this perspective, arguing that ESD bears the potential to overcome “universal vs. individual” tensions and dichotomies. Our line of reasoning is that the “capabilities approach” (CA), although it did not originally focus on children, can offer a useful theoretical framework in support of ESD, thanks to its multidimensional nature and focus on the concrete agency of individuals. Accordingly, we see the CA as playing a key role in bridging the gap between universal prescriptions, which disregard the specificity of the actors involved, as well as the peculiar nature of their social environment and its context-specific needs or constraints. We supplement this theoretical discussion by presenting “The Flying Carpet”, an ongoing community-based education project that has elicited the active involvement of over one hundred 11–13 year old students in an urban regeneration project in a municipal district of Milan.

The impact of current trends in technology, digitalization and mass media on our global culture raises questions regarding the responsibility and ethics of research decisions in contemporary social and health sciences. Embedded in the dominant paradigms, these trends subtly affect our worldviews, our valuation of the human condition, and the nature of socio-political discourse. In such critical post normal times (SARDAR, 2009) radical imagination (HAIVEN & KHASNABISH, 2014) and epistemic activism, embracing non-dominant modes of knowledge production in the social and health sciences, becomes a necessity. Arts-based research (ABR) is resonant with the onto-epistemological perspectives and methodologies necessary to challenge and disrupt current unilateral and hegemonic paradigms underlying decaying societal and geo-political constructs. In this article, we advocate for the development of a global network of ABR scholars and stakeholders invoking a radical imaginative philosophy and arts-based research methodologies as an approach to social activism and epistemological change.

The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a 15-year plan of action for people, the planet and prosperity, adopted in 2015 by all UN Member States. It aims at improving the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere. Although the 2030 Agenda was not developed specifically for children there are many connections between it and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), as UNICEF has demonstrated by mapping the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) onto the UNCRC (Wernham, 2017). This mapping adopts a broad interpretation of the Global Goals and of the Convention but reinforces connections between the two and their potential for mutual advocacy and implementation. A crucial connection –let’s think of article 19 of the UNCRC– is the responsibility placed on institutions, to End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children (SDG 16.2). Particularly educational institutions (SDG 4) such as school, it is argued, carry an imperative role to stimulate sustainable development, by working on social relations and conditions to promote a violence free community. However, despite international legislations on child protection, it is always a question of interpretation and negotiation as concerns how these rights are materialized in various countries’ educational policy, as well as why they are described as important to consider (Ball et al., 2012; Know Violence in Childhood,2017). With this as a background it becomes of interest to analyze and compare how the need to protect children from violence is interpreted and enacted in national contexts and in relation to research about violence (Ball et. Alt, 2012; Francia and Edling, 2017; Biffi, 2017). Sweden and Italy are two countries interesting to look at from a European perspective, due to their specific culture and approaches to child violence. Sweden is described as a highly secular (previously protestant) and individualistic country. Contrary to this, It

Il presente contributo intende offrire una riflessione sul ruolo dell’educazione nella partecipazione dei giovani, intesa come “fine” e “mezzo” stesso per il raggiungimento di un bene comune e per la conseguente edificazione di comunità realmente democratiche. A tal fine, si proporrà una riflessione sulle più recenti politiche europee in ambito di partecipazione, tra cui le ultime risoluzioni di Unione europea e Consiglio d’Europa. La partecipazione giovanile non viene considerata soltanto come un obiettivo delle politiche europee in esame, bensì come un’esperienza di apprendimento in grado di rafforzare le competenze di cittadinanza e il senso di appartenenza dei giovani alla società. Allo stesso tempo, viene ribadito il ruolo centrale dell’educazione che, dando vita alle affermazioni politiche, promuove esperienze di partecipazione a tutti gli aspetti della vita, supportando i giovani nella costruzione di un bene comune.

The post-COVID syndrome is emerging as a new chronic condition, characterized by symptoms of breathlessness, fatigue, and decline of neurocognitive functions. Rehabilitation programs that include physical training seem to be beneficial to reduce such symptoms and improve patients’ quality of life. Given this, and considering the limitations imposed by the pandemic on rehabilitation services, it emerged the need to integrate telerehabilitation programs into clinical practice. Some telerehabilitation solutions, also based on virtual reality (VR), are available in the market. Still, they mainly focus on rehabilitation of upper limbs, balance, and cognitive training, while exercises like cycling or walking are usually not considered. The presented work aims to fill this gap by integrating a VR application to provide cardio-respiratory fitness training to post-COVID patients in an existing telerehabilitation platform. The ARTEDIA application allows patients to perform a cycling exercise and a concurrent cognitive task. Patients can cycle in a virtual park while performing a “go/no-go” task by selecting only specific targets appearing along the way. The difficulty of the practice can be adjusted by the therapists, while the physiological response is continuously monitored through wearable sensors to ensure safety. The application has been integrated into the VRRS system by Khymeia. In the next months, a study to assess the feasibility of a complete telerehabilitation program based on physical and cognitive training will take place. Such a program will combine the existing VRRS exercises and the cardio-respiratory fitness exercise provided by the ARTEDIA application. Feasibility, acceptance, and usability will be assessed from both the patients’ and the therapists’ sides.

This contribution offers a pedagogical reflection on the methodology adopted within the training experience "Just YOUth. Having a say is a sustainable action' [Just YOUth. Prendere parola è un’azione sostenibile]. It was promoted within the orientation program of the University of Milan Bicocca (Italy) addressed to secondary school students. The aim was to promote a learning process around the meanings and possibilities of ‘having a say’, the first step for participation in decision-making processes. In fact, learning to ‘have a say’ is a crucial ability to orient one’s own decisions in relation to the self and the community one is part of. These decisions include choosing how to build one’s own life project, also in relation to the choice of an educational path. Moreover, acknowledging the role of young people in public decision-making processes, together with adults, assumes a specific pedagogical, ethical and political value (Bertolini, 2003). In fact, learning to have a say is a crucial starting point for the development of a sustainable, just, equitable world (Riva, 2018; UN, 2018). Within this framework, Just YOUth gave the young people the opportunity to meet local but also international youth realities, including, for example, collectives, representative bodies, and peer tutoring realities working in the field of children’s and young people’s rights, activism, social and political participation. They orientate decisions in collaboration with adults, showing how participation is an intergenerational process. The proposal included classes, workshops, discussions and meetings, where university lecturers and professionals from the public and third sectors and young people showcased their work and allowed the participants themselves to actively experience different ways of taking the floor. Another crucial aspect is related to the variety of languages that can be used for having a say. The participants were able to experiment with the use of different languages

This paper describes the journey of a group of six international arts-based researchers who convened in 2019 at the ECQI for a Gamechanger event. The goal was to create a transdisciplinary and transglobal group advocating for the visibility, accessibility, and valuation of Arts-Based Research (ABR). The mission was driven by the desire to contribute to the understanding of underlying beyond-words human intersubjective phenomena and resulting collective behaviors that influence our world but elude more traditional research methods. Conceptualized within an historical and contemporary socio-political context of turbulence, oppression, and inequity, the aspiration was that ABR might transcend the usual rhetoric exposing the trauma and toxicity while enhancing empathic, compassionate, and meaningful social discourse essential to creative reformative social justice. Thus, the Arts-Based Research (ABR) Global Consortium was formed. With the formation of our consortium and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to begin our first research project “Sustaining Life on Earth: Arts-Based Responses to the Lived Experience of COVID-19”, which was initiated in 2020 and completed in 2022. Nineteen individuals volunteered to participate as co-researchers, alongside the six member core team, submitting their arts-based and narrative responses to the project. The core team guiding the project collected and organized the submissions while simultaneously entering into an immersive, iterative, dynamic arts-based and dialogic process with the data and each other. In these immersive processes, we considered a priori themes of emotional impact, social framing, and aesthetic power of the art and narrative data as well as opening to emergent themes. Analysis included narrative and sensorial-based coding, responsive art making, collaborative and individual multi-genre memos, and reflections on all submissions. The final result of the project is an artsbased and performative piece

l presente contributo si propone di esplorare e riflettere, da una prospettiva pedagogica, sulla casa come luogo di educazione per le bambine e i bambini che la abitano attraverso la prospettiva offerta dall’emergenza pandemica in corso. Nella prima infanzia la dimora della famiglia rappresenta il luogo entro il quale il bambino comincia a prendere coscienza di sé, e a esistere proprio a partire dallo spazio della casa. L’emergenza COVID-19 ha imposto un ritorno forzato alle mura domestiche portando a ripensare il ruolo della casa.Si intende, pertanto, condividere alcune riflessioni peda-gogiche a partire dai risultati di una ricerca qualitativa (parte del progetto Europeo Erasmus+ DEPCIP) condotta durante il lockdown di marzo-maggio 2020 e volta a comprendere l’impatto che un periodo prolungato di confinamento ha avuto sull’ambiente fa-miliare. Il contributo si basa su una ricerca quali-quantitativa (Ted-dlie & Tasshakori, 2006), condotta attraverso l’intervista semi-strutturata Computer Assisted Web Interview (CAWI). Circa 1000 genitori provenienti dai Paesi coinvolti nel progetto sono stati raggiunti, di cui 400 italiani. Lo studio ha inoltre indagato le relazioni con gli spazi domestici e pubblici, mostrando come l’isolamento abbia provocato una ridefinizione delle “geografie di casa” delle famiglie (Blunt & Varley, 2004). A partire dai risultati di ricerca il presente paper rifletterà sulla complessità dei significati di casa che si sono andati attraversando nel corso di questo periodo emergenziale e delle sue ricadute sul piano educativo.

This paper explores aspects of parenting during COVID-19 lockdown, analyzing the international literature and presenting a study conducted in Italy during the initial period of social isolation (March-May 2020). The pandemic has made childcare challenging for parents globally, compromising the well-being and mental health of caregivers themselves (Brooks et al., 2020), and creating a potentially highly vulnerable situation for children (Gromada, Richardson, Rees, 2020). The COVID-19 emergency and the restrictions it has entailed bear short- and long-term implications for families, including the potential impact of delaying implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015) and increased risk of children witnessing or experiencing violence and abuse (End Violence Against Children, 2020). Given this background, we investigated the family ecosystem, exploring both individual and parental factors in parents’ relationships with their children, during lockdown.

Arts-based approaches and languages are valuable resources for the field of education, with the potential to enhance both educational work (Zuccoli, 2020) and educational research (Biffi, Zuccoli, 2019). In educational research specifically, Arts-Based Research Methods (ABR) (Baron, Eisner, 2012; Cole, Knowles, 2008) – understood here as a range of approaches that recognize the artistic process itself as a mode of inquiry – may usefully be adopted alongside or in combination with other research methodologies. However, implementing such approaches requires specific competence in both art-based languages and research methods. In this paper, we present a project entitled the Arts-based Research-Global Classroom, a training course designed to provide PhD students and early career researchers with the knowledge and skills they need to deploy ABR methods in educational settings. The course is jointly delivered by the University of Milan-Bicocca and Drexel University, Florida. The concept is that of a learning laboratory, where students are given the opportunity to critically and reflexively discuss and evaluate perspectives, philosophical positions, and research questions that can lead to the design of collaborative research projects using art-based research methods. The course takes place over eight monthly sessions, each lasting around three hours. Part of the sessions takes the form of workshops based on artistic practices such as collage, assemblage, dance, drawing, and small group work.

Game activity is fundamental for children’s cognitive and social development. During recent years, technology development has led to changes in several areas, including the ludic one. However, while in the literature, there are plenty of studies that report the importance of technology-based games in rehabilitation program, little attention has been paid to their role as pure entertainment. In contrast, the market does not provide videogames that are engaging, accessible, and inclusive. In this context, a survey was distributed to families who have a child with neuromotor limitations to investigate how these children deal with play, in particular with videogames, and what the requirements are for accessible and inclusive videogames. FightTheStroke distributed the questionnaire to families with a child with neuromotor impairments in April 2020. Fifty-six families responded to the survey. The answers revealed that children generally manifest positive feelings when playing with videogames, especially with cooperative ones, even if they are not fully accessible. The survey also collected user needs and suggestions from families about the design of videogames for neuromotor-impaired children. Guidelines derived from the survey are reported for the development of entertaining, inclusive, and accessible videogames, playable by children with neuromotor disabilities.