Citizenship Education for Youth: Beyond Competences in the University

In the contemporary era, citizenship education is increasingly urgent due to a perceived crisis in democratic participation and the rise of neoliberal rationalities. The neoliberal “logos” tends to produce a “subject-citizen” focused on individual performance, entrepreneurship, and competitiveness, often reducing citizenship to a functional status or a set of soft skills for employability (Brown, 2015; Laval et al., 2011). Within this context, the university faces a critical choice: to act as a factory for human capital (Fleming, 2021) or to reclaim its role as a “public space” for the development of an ethos of democratic citizenship (Dewey, 1916). This challenges the assumption that research is the exclusive domain of specialists or academics. As argued by Appadurai (2006), research primarily involves the ability to formulate meaningful questions, identify pathways for exploring them, and place one’s inquiries in dialogue with other viewpoints, without the expectation of reaching definitive answers. Research thus becomes a practice of interpreting reality and engaging with others, encompassing the public sharing of the knowledge produced. This leads to the recognition of a fundamental right: the right to be educated in and through research, enabling individuals to shape their life projects and contribute to the communities to which they belong. In this direction, this study is also grounded in the theoretical perspective of Gert Biesta (2014), distinguishing between qualification, socialization, and subjectification. The latter is central to the present research: it represents the educational aim of enabling individuals to exist as autonomous agents, capable of critical thinking and independent action, rather than simply conforming to existing social orders. We frame citizenship not as a predefined set of lessons to be taught, but as an “act” (Larkins, 2014) and a “practice” that requires participatory spheres where young people can exercise their voice. To operationalize this framework, the research focuses on the B-YOUth Forum, an initiative developed within the MUSA (Multilayered Urban Sustainability Action, 2022–2025) ecosystem, a large-scale project funded by the Italian NRRP aimed at promoting urban regeneration and social inclusion through collaboration between universities and territories. The B-YOUth Forum is conceptualized as a model of interdisciplinary and intergenerational research in which young people become co-authors of knowledge rather than passive subjects of study (Montà, Ratotti, Biffi, 2026, in press). In the project, young people meet and work with researchers and are invited to critically interrogate the realities they inhabit. However, they need to be accompanied in their encounter with the university and research. Therefore, central to this model is the role of the pedagogical facilitator (Kennedy, 2004; Aldana, 2016), understood not merely as a moderator of activities, but as a pedagogical and epistemological positioning. The facilitator sustains spaces of speech in which young people’s experiences, knowledge, and embodied narratives emerge as legitimate forms of meaning-making, fundamental for social and civic practices. Facilitation thus functions as a mediating device that translates institutional logics into accessible frameworks, while rendering young participants’ perspectives and agency visible to institutions. Within this framework, the central research question is: How can research, through pedagogical facilitation, foster citizenship competences? This question moves beyond research as data collection and frames it as a formative space in which participants actively practise citizenship (Biffi, Montà, Ratotti, 2025, in press). Pedagogical facilitation becomes crucial to support dialogue, reflexivity, and the negotiation of meanings within group processes. The study therefore investigates how facilitated research settings enable young people to exercise voice, recognise differences, and build shared responsibility, strengthening citizenship competences as lived and relational educational experiences. The contribution will analyse the B-YOUth Forum research project (2022-2025) as its primary case study. The methodological core of this proposal is to demonstrate how research, when structured as a participatory and facilitated process, functions as a powerful tool for citizenship education. The methodological key aspects of the project that will be discussed are: - the researcher’s posture: adopting a "pedagogical facilitation" stance, the researcher acted as a device to open "spaces of speech," bridging the gap between academic rigor and youth life-worlds; - research as practice: the presentation will illustrate how the specific research tools used within the B-YOUth Forum (moodboards and storyboards, personal reflective journals) were not merely for data collection, but served as activators of citizenship competences; - research as dissemination and public engagement: A key methodological phase to be discussed is the Peer-Mentoring Cycle during the "GenerAzioni Festival”, the dissemination and public engagement event that concludes each B-YOUth Forum cycle. This phase represents the empirical evidence of developed competencies: here, the youth transitioned from "researchers" to "mentors," facilitating workshops for peers. This shift enabled the observation of civic agency in action – from the co-construction of knowledge to its public dissemination and social impact. The collected data underwent thematic analysis (Mortari, 2016), which enabled the identification of recurring patterns and emergent themes in the participants’ narratives. This analytical approach allowed for an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon under analysis. Among the citizenship competences emerging from the thematic analysis of the data are: - Contextual literacy, understood as the ability to read, interpret, and situate oneself within specific social, educational, and relational contexts. - Reflective questioning connected to lived experience, namely the capacity to formulate questions that bridge research activities and one’s everyday life, enabling processes of transfer and re-signification. - Openness to alternative possibilities, expressed through the ability to question taken-for-granted assumptions and to imagine different ways of being, acting, and understanding reality. - Critical reflection on the research process itself, encompassing an awareness of the implications, responsibilities, and ethical dimensions of doing research, as well as of one’s own positioning within it. - Ethical awareness, particularly in relation to confidentiality, consent, and respect for others’ experiences and narratives within the research process. - Peer dissemination and knowledge sharing, involving the capacity to communicate research experiences to peers, including what it means to engage in research laboratories, interact with researchers from different disciplines, and engage in inquiry-driven dialogue. The findings suggest that the pedagogical facilitator is crucial in preventing participatory processes from becoming tokenistic. Through decentring, attentiveness, and active listening, the facilitator sustains conditions for subjectification (Biesta, 2020), enabling young people to reclaim voice, visibility, and agency in the public sphere. Participants experienced research as an opportunity for personal and collective transformation. To support this learning and fulfil the project’s civic objectives, the B-YOUth Forum model combined methodological rigour with creative openness. Narrative and autobiographical approaches (Biffi, 2010; Demetrio, 1998, 2012; Gamelli & Formenti, 1998) fostered self-reflection and links between individual experiences and their social meanings, supported by tools such as free writing, peer interviews, and reflective journals. Artistic and visual languages (Addone et al., 2020; Biffi & Zuccoli, 2015, 2019; Cassidy, 2008), including videomaking, collage, photography, and moodboards, activated non-linear expression (Guilford, 1967; De Bono, 1968/1969; Corradi Fiumara, 1998), allowing embodied and affective dimensions to emerge beyond verbal language. Ultimately, this contribution argues that higher education can cultivate democratic citizenship not as a curricular outcome, but as a lived practice of participation, recognition, and co-responsibility. Participatory and pedagogically mediated research offers concrete conditions for youths to exercise voice, negotiate difference, and contribute to the democratisation of knowledge as a form of social justice.