Conference Agenda

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.

Tracing expert reasoning in SEN diagnoses: abductive pathways to educational recommendations

Expert committees produce diagnostic reports that carry high stakes for patients. These texts mediate access to special educational needs (SEN) services, shape school placements and legitimise accommodations. Although such reports usually document assessment results in detail, the inferential steps that connect evidence to recommendations are often condensed into short summaries. This opacity has practical consequences beyond the style. In decision-theoretical terms, SEN judgements integrate heterogeneous evidence—test profiles, classroom performance, developmental history, and contextual constraints—and frequently involve abductive reasoning, inferring the "best explanation" under uncertainty. This study aimed to reconstruct these reasoning pathways and test whether distinct configurations of evidence systematically align with recommendation types.

Research questions: (RQ1) What types of warrants and reasoning moves justify the recommendations? (RQ2) Where do abductive "leaps" occur—points at which the recommendation is not straightforwardly derivable from the preceding evidence narrative? (RQ3) Which configurations of coded conditions are sufficient or necessary for (a) integrated education with accommodations and (b) more segregated educational arrangements?

The dataset comprised 235 anonymised SEN diagnostic reports from a regional expert committee in the 2019/20 school year. We extracted two narrative units from each report: (1) interpretive synthesis of assessment findings and (2) recommendation package (placement, accommodations, and development directions). We conducted a combined deductive–inductive qualitative content analysis to develop a codebook with four blocks: difficulty domains (e.g. reading, writing, numeracy, attention/executive functioning, memory, language), contextual qualifiers (e.g. multilingualism, absenteeism, socio-emotional stressors, school resources), trajectory indicators (e.g. documented response to intervention, stability of difficulties across years), and recommendation elements (e.g. integrated education, reduced workload, extra time, assistive tools, targeted remediation, special class/school).

Two coders independently coded a stratified subset and resolved disagreements through analytic memos, refining the codebook accordingly. Subsequently, we converted selected codes into fuzzy-set membership scores (gradual rather than binary categories) and applied fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify necessary and sufficient configurations for two outcomes: "integrated education with accommodations" and "segregated arrangement recommended." Throughout, we used qualitative interpretations to explain the fsQCA solutions and identify textual markers of abductive reasoning.

A stable macro-structure emerged across reports—evidential inventory → interpretive synthesis → recommendation package—yet the synthesis section varied markedly in how it justified the transitions. Four warrant types were identified. Measurement-led warrants anchor decisions in standardised profiles and discrepancy patterns. Trajectory-led warrants prioritised longitudinal school history and documented responses to prior support. Contextualised warrants reframed the test findings through environmental or instructional constraints. Precautionary warrants justified stronger recommendations in the presence of uncertainty, often using risk language ("to prevent further failure").

Abductive "leaps" clustered at two points: when evidence was mixed (strong test indicators but weak classroom corroboration, or vice versa) and when contextual factors were invoked late, functioning as post-hoc explanations.

The fsQCA results supported equifinality, as multiple pathways reliably led to the same recommendation type. Integrated education with accommodations was consistently associated with configurations combining domain-specific difficulties with positive trajectory indicators (benefiting from prior support and stable school participation) and low contextual risk. In contrast, segregated arrangements aligned with multi-domain difficulty configurations combined with negative trajectory indicators (limited response to intervention and persistent functional impact) and, frequently, precautionary warrants. Importantly, no single test-domain code functioned as a universal "trigger." Rather, the interaction between domains, trajectories, and contextual qualifiers explained the variation in decisions. These findings suggest that the main source of perceived subjectivity is not the presence of judgement per se but the under-specification of warrants that link evidence to action.

By making diagnostic reasoning explicit, this study contributes to transparency and professional learning in SEN systems. The warrant-based codebook can be adapted as a reflective checklist for report writing (What evidence is used? What warrants connects it to the decision? Are contextual assumptions stated?) and as a training scaffold in special educator and school psychologist education. For schools and families, clearer reasoning maps can support a shared understanding of accommodations and reduce conflict around placement decisions. At the system level, the combination of qualitative mapping with fsQCA offers a practical quality assurance approach that respects case complexity while still enabling pattern detection across large corpora.