Conference Agenda

The UNITA Starting Grant project 2025-2026 “AMPLIVOICES: Amplifying Silenced Voices Through Service-learning: Towards Polyphonic Solutions” brings together six partner universities in Italy, Portugal, Romania, and Spain.

The aim of the project is to create a collaborative research initiative that integrates democratic citizenship and inclusive community with Service-learning as an emancipatory pedagogy to innovate higher education and promote learning communities. This international collaboration addresses capacity-building for service-learning from a critical stance, by way of promoting a shared epistemic community exploring “how to hear” silenced narratives so as to invite epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007). How does a critical approach to “voice” reconfigure epistemic authority, audibility, and ethical thresholds in how faculty assemble service-learning pathways?

In this paper, we are going to reflect specifically on how service-learning may better serve transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991) when community members, stakeholders, students, and academic staff are all equally engaged as knowers, brought into dialogue through multimodal inclusive languages and media.

This project expands higher education learning by challenging linear “service delivery” models and

foregrounding a participatory research pedagogy where knowledge is co-constructed and negotiated across university–community systems. It raises pedagogical challenges for faculty: sustaining emergent design, cooperative work, and peer assessment while keeping epistemic authority, audibility, and ethical boundaries open to negotiation.

We will reflect on a pedagogy of care for the quality of the relationships in the educational community that considers what goes beyond and between words - who am I for you, who are you for me (Formenti & West, 2018). The conference focus on strengthening democracy in higher education prompts us to reflect on how service-learning projects may be designed to promote the development of democratic competences and to empower learners to have a positive long-term influence on democratic processes. A complex perspective sees learning as relational, inter-active, embedded, affective, and embodied. Therefore, the project explores participatory methods for their capacity to invite learners from different positionalities to become reflexive. Through dialogue, and creative media, more of their lived experience (feeling and thinking, personal and professional) may be brought into collective processes of meaning-making, practicing active listening and empathy, recognition and agency.

We suggest that new approaches to knowing in university settings, for both students and teaching staff, may disrupt hierarchical imaginations of teaching and learning and promote complexity in “how” we learn about democratic life.