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.

Service-learning (SL) is an educational approach that helps students to engage with society while learning on an academic, social, personal, and professional level (Salam, et al., 2019). Specifically, SL fosters democratic competences (Nortomaa & Grönlund, 2019). Teaching methodologies for the development of such skills refer to experiential learning through practical activities, which sometimes are developed as informal activities not officially recognized in terms of bearing credit for participation (Cinque, 2016). Thus, there is still difficulty to implement SL as a strategy for integrating democratic competences and personal growth in the academic curricula.

The aim of this study is to contribute to understanding how SL is inserted in the structures of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and how it contributes to develop democratic competences.

Methodology

We use a qualitative approach, by conducting a literature review of project reports issued by the UCM (2018–2025) (Xu & Zammit, 2020). We also use descriptive statistics to analyse the frequencies of the different codes.

Results and their impact

Results show that the institutionalization of SL at the UCM is mainly due to calls for project proposals. First calls emerged in 2015 as part of a specific programme of teaching innovation. In the years that followed, both information sessions and signing of an agreement between the UCM and Madrid City Council to promote SL projects, as well as further specific project calls, led to a significant increase in the number of SL experiences carried out (20 in 2019). Moreover, with the establishment of a SL office in 2020, the number of projects increased by 47% on that year. Part of the success of the rise was due to the reports that accompanied the calls for applications, training courses in some faculties, conducting research to share the findings and related outreach events.

Regarding the integration of democratic competences, following the instructions provided in the calls, most SL projects aim to develop critically reflecting, inclusive thinking, supporting the environment, intercultural understanding, ethical thinking and responsible participation in civic life (Gil-Serna et al., 2025). At the same time, those competences are linked with the eco-social principles of the 2030 Agenda.

We can conclude that there is currently an institutional involvement of UCM in SL, as this methodology is integrated into teaching practice across various knowledge areas, notably, within the Social Sciences area in the Faculty of Education, and in Health Science through the Faculty of Pharmacy.

This presentation showcases Service Learning projects developed across the Faculties of the Brescia Campus of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy). In line with the conference theme, the presentation focuses specifically on the initiative 'Literature and Emotions'. First-year students from the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures collaborated with the editorial staff of Zona 508, a newspaper produced by inmates at the Canton Mombello prison in Brescia.

In partnership with the association Carcere e Territorio, which has been active in local prisons for many years, the project identified the following main objectives: promoting dialogue between the 'inside' and 'outside' of prison through the reading of literary texts and the production of written and journalistic content; creating opportunities for direct encounters between students and inmates, enabling them to share emotions and reflections; fostering the development of civic competencies and encouraging active, responsible participation in community life; and engaging the wider public through a dedicated event and a special issue of the newspaper devoted to literature in prison.

These encounters gave students a meaningful opportunity to challenge stereotypes and prejudices about incarcerated individuals, while also foregrounding the relational, communicative and emotional dimensions of the experience. The project also encouraged critical reflection on the Italian prison system, particularly in relation to the Brescia context, and on the extent to which prison conditions align with national and European standards and with broader principles of human dignity.

The experience fostered empathy and solidarity, as reflected in students’ reflections: 'I did not imagine that there could be so much humanity in such a context. It is remarkable that such different people can share the same space and engage in peaceful, mutually enriching dialogue.' Another student noted: 'I felt part of a world that society tries to conceal and avoid. I would like to thank the inmate editors, who gave us a glimpse into their daily reality.'

When effectively integrated, service and learning can respond to students’ educational needs. When placed at the service of the community, knowledge becomes a practice of active citizenship, fostering individuals who are capable of critical thinking, recognising social needs and providing informed, sensitive responses.