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.

Description of the topic/focus of the work and link to the conference theme

Service-Learning (SL) integrates academic learning with socially relevant action, enhancing both educational quality and community engagement. Since 2015, Universidad San Jorge (USJ) has developed multiple SL initiatives across its degree programs. However, these experiences have not been systematically analyzed as a whole, limiting understanding of their evolution, overall impact, and alignment with institutional priorities.

This study responds to the need to move from isolated and dispersed SL experiences towards a more structured, coordinated and sustained institutional approach. It examines how SL has developed at USJ over the past ten-year period and explores the conditions that support its consolidation within university structures and practices. Within the Uniservitate framework, the project seeks to strengthen SL as a strategic pillar for educational innovation and meaningful social engagement.

Methodology

A sequential exploratory mixed-methods evaluative design is applied.

Phase 1 consists of a retrospective review of funded SL projects (2015–2025), analyzing variables such as degree program, academic year, social needs addressed, type of intervention, learning outcomes, service activities, collaborating entities, and participant and beneficiary profiles.

Phase 2 involves a qualitative narrative study based on focus groups with students, faculty members, technical staff, and community partners. This phase explores stakeholders’ perceptions of the strengths, limitations, and key factors influencing the development and consolidation of SL initiatives.

The integration of both phases allows for a comprehensive understanding of SL at USJ, combining descriptive scope with in-depth insights into stakeholder experiences and institutional dynamics.

Results and their impact

Although data collection and analysis are currently ongoing, expected results include: (1) a comprehensive institutional mapping of SL experiences using standardized and comparable indicators; (2) identification of common patterns, persistent gaps, and emerging strategic opportunities; (3) recognition of key facilitators and barriers to SL institutionalization across different stakeholder groups; and (4) development of practical recommendations to enhance the quality, coherence, and long-term sustainability of SL initiatives.

The findings are expected to inform the design of an institutional strategy that supports the meaningful curricular integration of SL, strengthens faculty engagement, improves evaluation mechanisms, and fosters sustainable long-term collaboration with community partners. Ultimately, the study aims to consolidate a coherent and institutionally embedded SL model that reinforces both educational processes and the university’s social mission and commitment.

This paper responds directly to the growing need to better theorise and evidence how service-learning contributes to competences for democratic culture, as highlighted by the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). It positions North Wales as a functioning model of place-based system change using the Well-being of future generations Act (Wales) 2015 as a framework for change (Welsh Government, 2015). Where a higher education institute operates as a civic anchor within a coordinated regional ecosystem to test and explore different approaches to democratic learning and civic engagement in collective challenges across educational phases. (Ruddle et al, 2020)

Drawing on two empirical case studies led by Wrexham University, the North Wales Children’s University Pilot 2023-2024 and Lle Llais 2025 Public Map initiative on the Isle of Anglesey, the paper examines how trauma-informed, place-based service-learning fosters democratic competences from early childhood (ACE Hub Wales and Traumatic Stress Wales, 2022). The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining participation data, programme evaluation, and qualitative analysis of children’s narratives.

The Children’s University pilot engaged over 1,100 children across six local authorities in structured extracurricular service-learning designed to build social capital, aspiration, and community connectedness. Findings demonstrate that when schools act as civic anchors within a wider system and structural barriers to access are reduced, children’s agency, participation, and skill development increase significantly. Notably, children from areas of highest deprivation achieved the strongest completion rates, suggesting that equitable service-learning can disrupt entrenched inequalities (Wood, 2024) .

Lle Llais 2025 extends this work through trauma-informed, arts- and nature-based engagement with 253 children across eight schools. Delivered in partnership with Welsh Bards and community organisations, the project evidences how culturally rooted, creative practice fosters emotional safety, empathy, voice, and belonging (Wood and Shepley, 2026). Children’s narratives identify six core dimensions of democratic wellbeing: happiness, friendship, nature, safety, creativity, and inner calm, which align with key RFCDC domains, particularly values (respect, openness), attitudes (empathy, civic-mindedness), and skills (listening, cooperation, critical expression).

The paper contributes empirical evidence to an underdeveloped field by demonstrating how democratic competences can be cultivated through integrated, trauma-informed service-learning ecosystems (Cherry, 2025). It further argues that North Wales offers a transferable model for the institutionalisation of service-learning, highlighting implications for pedagogy, system leadership and civic infrastructure, and curriculum design (Ruddle and Arriaga-Garcia, 2026) .