1. Introduction

The project stems from the need to analyse schools as educational ecosystems, with the specific aim of investigating the emerging learning-hub form of schooling within the Italian education system.

From this perspective, the OECD (2020) identifies the school-as-a-learning-hub scenario as one of the possible configurations of schooling in the near future. Building on the current sociological interest in “the future” (Levitas 2013; Poli 2017), in 2023 an interdisciplinary group of researchers, pedagogists and sociologists (INDIRE and IRPPS-CNR), launched a study on small and rural schools in Italy to examine whether the OECD learning-hub characteristics are transferable to small and rural contexts.

The present study investigates how three Italian schools selected from Northern, Central, and Southern Italy, mapped at national level, conceptualise and enact the learning hub form of schooling (Chipa et al., 2025). The project responds to the following objectives: Ob.1) to adapt and transfer the Learning Hub concept to the Italian context; Ob.2) to gather the views of school stakeholders on the future of education.

The study guided by the OECD scenario “School as a Learning Hub”, defined two research questions focusing on changes in teaching and learning practices in small schools:

RQ1: How do small schools conceptualise and enact changes in teaching and learning when operating as learning hubs?

RQ2: What kind of teaching does a school as a learning hub require, and what characteristics will the learning environment have?

2. Method

The study adopts an exploratory qualitative research design, combining inventive methods (Lury & Wakeford, 2013; Giorgi et al., 2021) with qualitative content analysis, focusing specifically on the teaching and learning dimension of the learning hub model.

The empirical design includes:

a national questionnaire survey conducted within the INDIRE Small Schools Network (n = 54), to identify schools conceived as learning hubs in relation to teaching and learning practices and select three case studies from Northern, Central, and Southern Italy;

Future Imagination Labs, participatory workshops designed to stimulate co-constructive and anticipatory reflections on the future of schooling, with attention to how teaching and learning practices are reimagined within the learning hub scenario.

a qualitative content analysis based on a structured codebook (Schilling, 2006), developed across six predefined dimensions (spaces, time, teaching and learning, leadership, partnerships, and professional development). For the purposes of this contribution, the analysis privileges the teaching and learning dimension, while maintaining the multidimensional structure of the codebook to ensure analytical coherence and comparability across cases.

3. Results and Discussion

The findings for the Teaching and Learning dimension show how learning processes are shaped differently across the three contexts.

In the Piemonte case, the school functions as an outdoor learning laboratory: teaching and learning are strongly place-based, and the local area becomes both the content and the learning environment, supported by close collaboration with the local administration, businesses, and associations.

In Campania school, the teaching and learning activities are designed around real-life situations, civic engagement and cooperative projects involving families, associations, and local stakeholders. The school opens to the community and uses the territory as an extended classroom.

Finally, the school in Liguria Teaching and learning combine experiential, outdoor and civic-oriented practices with digital and performance-oriented innovation. Learning frequently takes place in “third spaces” such as museums, urban environments, and community facilities.

4. Educational Significance of the research

The core idea for a learning hub model for small and rural schools is to move away from rigid structures toward a flexible, community-integrated approach which includes the following pillars:

Context-Driven Instruction: Teaching models must be tailored to local needs and specific student requirements.

Professional Collaboration: Innovation is only possible through interprofessional teamwork. This requires dedicated time and tools for teachers to collaborate with colleagues, external experts, and community members via school clusters and peer-learning networks.

Schools as Community Hubs: Schools should expand their role beyond traditional standard education, offering services to families and supporting adult education (upskilling/reskilling).

Strategic Partnerships: Success depends on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to provide the necessary infrastructure, technology, and digital skills.

The study emphasizes that learning hubs should be viewed as strategic investments in educational quality and shared governance, rather than simple cost-cutting measures.

The power of German school providers to shape future education has changed significantly in recent years with regard to digital school development (Jarke & Breiter 2019): Originally, they were responsible for all ‘external’ school matters such as the furnishing and maintenance of school buildings, equipment, teaching and learning materials as well as for non-teaching staff (Avenarius & Füssel 2010). However, in the course of a variety of modernisation initiatives, school providers are now given further possibilities of participation (Hermstein 2021) when it comes to the ‘internal’ design of the regional school system (Järvinen et al. 2014). For example, they set clearly recognisable parameters for internal school development when implementing concepts of inclusion (Tegge 2020), all-day schooling (Berkemeyer et al. 2025) or educational technology (ForumBD, 2020; Tellisch 2020).

The approach of the BMBF-funded, interdisciplinary joint project TOBIS: ‘Transprofessional organisational development - Innovative cooperation between school authorities on digital change and OER/OEP’ (website: https://tobis.click) seeks to strengthen transprofessional cooperation between school authorities and other education stakeholders in order to promote the use of open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) at school. The project includes 30 rural, urban and private school authorities from all over Germany. After an initial needs assessment based on guided interviews and a questionnaire survey on the key topics of transprofessionality, organisation and governance, digitalisation, and OER/OEP, a cross-network prioritisation of central topics was carried out.

The results show that many of the school providers the project is researching have already moved beyond their traditional role as mere providers of material resources, being responsible not only for the administrative and organisational aspects of purchasing IT infrastructure and devices. These providers are aware that their decisions for or against certain technical solutions (e.g. BYOD vs. iPads; open source vs. purchased software; decentralised vs. centralised server infrastructure) can have far-reaching implications for the pedagogical and didactic decision-making options and scope available to teachers. In this way, they can influence the extent to which schools (can) pursue, for example, their open educational practices.

At the same time, these school providers find themselves in complex situations involving numerous stakeholders (e.g. political decision-makers, their schools, IT support, media (competence) centres, further training offers for teachers) and are subject to financial or hierarchical constraints. In addition, there is often a lack of pedagogical expertise, making the improvement of transprofessional cooperation among all those involved in digital school development a declared desideratum.

Within the project, research-practice partnerships are currently being established with school providers interested in deeper cooperation. These partnerships envisage close co-constructive collaboration between researchers and educational practitioners based on joint reflection opportunities (Coburn et al. 2013; Farrell et al. 2021). Practice partners gain new options for action and understandings of their roles within their complex set of conditions, while researchers gain new research questions, hypotheses and opportunities for investigation.

This contribution introduces the TOBIS project and its concept, and presents the process of the implementation of OER-related RPPs. It explores the dynamics of these partnerships and how school providers, as actors not primarily part of the school system, can initiate targeted changes in future schooling. The project emphasises the importance of school providers as ‘new drivers’ for complex development processes and aims to make their work and impact visible, following the lead of the Open Recognition movement (see https://openrecognition.org/). By doing so, the project contributes to shaping the education of the future, enabling learners to master current and future challenges effectively.

Introduction

In recent years, the concept of the extended school has gained relevance in international educational research and policy as a response to social inequalities, territorial marginality, and the need to reposition schools as active hubs within local learning ecosystems (OECD, 2020; UNESCO, 2021). Extended schools transcend physical boundaries, reconfigure educational spaces and times, and build structured alliances with families, communities, and local organizations to support inclusive and future-oriented learning trajectories. Within this policy landscape, school vision has been identified as a central lever for educational transformation. Vision is increasingly understood as a collective and intentional projection of a desirable educational future (Poli, 2024) integrating values, pedagogical aims, and organizational choices (Fullan, 2016; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009). Recent research highlights vision-making as a generative and epistemic device for professional learning and transformative leadership, particularly when co-constructed through participatory processes (Mangione et al., 2025). Despite this emphasis, a critical gap remains. While schools are encouraged to articulate visions of extended schooling, limited attention has been paid to how these visions can be made explicit, analytically comparable, and operationally usable for organizational decision-making. Design Thinking (DT), grounded in participatory design and human-centered innovation, has been shown to foster professional creativity, collective sense-making, and distributed leadership in complex educational environments (Brown, 2008; Cross, 2023; Mangione et al., 2025). Against this background, the study addresses the following research question: In what ways do Design Thinking processes and tools make different visions of extended schooling visible and comparable?

Method

The study adopts a qualitative, exploratory multiple-case study design (Yin, 2018), embedded within research–practice partnership between a national educational research institute and a local municipality. The empirical context involves six schools, from early childhood to lower secondary level, engaged in a structured DT pathway aimed at co-designing visions of extended schooling.

The methodological framework integrates DT with grounded qualitative and visual analysis, drawing on research that conceptualizes DT as a generative methodology for educational innovation and vision-building. The DT process unfolded across three phases: (1) visual check-ins to elicit initial representations, values, and emotional orientations toward extended schooling; (2) personas and journey maps to articulate the needs and experiences of key stakeholders (students, teachers, families, community actors); and (3) impact maps translating shared visions into organizational scenarios and strategic priorities related to spaces, time arrangements, partnerships, and curriculum. Data sources include visual artefacts, written reflections, and transcribed group discussions. Analysis combined inductive coding of visual–narrative units with cross-case comparison Mortari & Ghirotto, 2019; Zhang, 2023)

Results and Discussion

The findings show that DT processes played a decisive role in making collective visions of extended schooling visible and comparable across the six schools. Creativity emerged as a collective and scaffolded process. Visual check-ins externalized initial imaginaries related to openness, collaboration, and wellbeing; personas and journey maps supported a shift from abstract ideas to situated understandings of stakeholders’ needs; impact maps functioned as synthesis artefacts translating visions into comparable strategic configurations. Six visions of extended schooling were identified: (1) the extended school as a space of wellbeing and care; (2) as an outdoor and ecological learning ecosystem; (3) as a community and cultural hub; (4) as a socio-emotional learning community; (5) as a laboratory for experiential and problem-based learning; and (6) as a space for time reconfiguration and work–life balance. Across these visions, DT tools enable comparison without standardization, revealing families of extended school forms rather than isolated cases.

Educational Significance of the research

This study contributes to research on the futures of schooling by offering a methodological framework for mapping and governing new forms of extended schooling. The findings show that Design Thinking enables schools to engage with educational futures as plural and situated, rather than predefined scenarios, aligning with research on vision as a generative device for future-oriented leadership (Fullan, 2007; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Mangione et al., 2025).

For school leadership, DT supports distributed and reflective practices through shared artefacts that orient decision-making on spaces, time, alliances, and curriculum. Creativity emerges as a collective capacity intentionally cultivated to support transformation. Particularl DT-based mapping supports sustainable, place-based innovation and strengthens school–community ecosystems . At policy level, the approach enables comparability without standardization, supporting informed governance of educational innovation and future-oriented school development.