• APS “Le Quattro Colonne” (Centro Anziani Ponte)
• Borgo Pio Rome

The need emerged from the initiative of a member of the Senior Centre, who sought to promote social and recreational activities based on the sharing of older adults’ life stories. Artificial Intelligence was identified as a tool to support the transformation of oral narratives into creative texts, overcoming barriers related to writing and enabling the preservation of participants’ memories. The proposal was subsequently presented to the Postgraduate School Educating for Encounter and Solidarity (EIS) of LUMSA University. The first meeting brought together the lecturer, the member of the Senior Centre who had initiated the contact, and the president of the Centre, signalling that the collaboration was endorsed by the centre as an institution from the outset, not only by the individual who had proposed it. The member of the Senior Centre then shared these needs with the students during course activities, enabling students to understand the community context and to participate in defining the project goals. Students and community partners subsequently co-designed the project response. As the community partner later reflected, he had come with a very simple request, though the project went further than anticipated: “All the additions you made were positive, they fitted perfectly. The music, for instance, was something I had not anticipated.” This organic expansion of the original proposal is itself evidence of genuine co-design.      

The collaboration originated from an initiative proposed by the community rather than by the university, representing a concrete example of reciprocity. Students contributed academic knowledge as well as creative and digital skills, while older participants shared their memories, life experiences, and personal wisdom. The relationships developed through the project generated mutual benefits that extended beyond its original objectives. For instance, one student chose to continue her engagement by undertaking an internship at the Senior Centre, while the visually impaired member of the Centre who had initiated the project described the walk he undertook to and from the Centre for each meeting as an unexpected source of personal enrichment: the project gave him, in his own words, “adrenalina”, meaning energy and momentum, and helped him “overcome a reluctance and a fear of going out to face difficulties.” The community partner reflected that “rarely do things proceed with such naturalness — this collaboration had the taste of naturalness.” 

The relationship was recognized by older people as “a creative cooperation“. Elderly participants participated in all phases, proposed adjustments and maintained a collaborative climate, including bringing pastries to meetings. Their experiential knowledge reshaped the project in real time. After the finalisation of the project, they received the e-book as a lasting cultural artefact.

The Trame di vita project was developed within the course Didactics and Special Pedagogy for Social Inclusion as a practical application of the course content and learning objectives. Conducted in partnership with APS “Le Quattro Colonne” (Centro Anziani Ponte), the initiative was designed according to the service-learning approach, integrating curricular activities, community service, and critical reflection.

The course was redesigned in response to what emerged in the field: theoretical content was restructured in real time to dialogue with what students encountered at the centre, and the project co-design evolved continuously through ongoing exchange. The lecturer described her role as one of accompaniment rather than direction, remaining present at every stage to support students and community participants without prescribing outcomes.

Attitudes and values

• civic responsibility and awareness of the educator’s role as active participant in building the common good
• empathy and ethical engagement
• reciprocity and respect for experiential knowledge as equal to academic knowledge
• continuous metacognitive reflection on the meaning of educational action and the ethics of care

Skills

• active listening, critical reflection and contextual analysis from real community needs
• free-form interviewing and life story collection
• pedagogical use of AI (ChatGPT) as a creative and relational tool
• collaborative project design with community partners
• facilitation of intergenerational dialogue
• adaptability to emotionally demanding contexts

Knowledge

• understanding key concepts of social inclusion
• quality of life and participatory educational design
• familiarity with community networking and the educator’s professional role in countering social marginalisation

Service activities

• free-form individual interviews with elderly participants to collect life storie
• AI-assisted reworking of oral narratives into poetic texts using ChatGPT
• collaborative musicalisation of poetic texts with the Music Education course
• co-creation of an intergenerational Decalogue, meaning ten civic principles co-produced by students and elderly participants
• production and publication of the e-book Trame di vita
• final public event “Voci dal Borgo: il filo delle generazioni” (“Voices from the Borough: the Thread of Generations”), 13 May 2025. 

Learning activities

• co-design of the project with students and community partners
• structured oral reflection at the end of each centre visit
• “¿Qué te Pa’?”, a structured collective reflection method in which participants share what struck them most about an experience, used jointly by students and elderly participants
• World Café, a facilitated group dialogue method using multiple simultaneous small discussion tables
• Truth Thermometer, a visual scale for gauging individual emotional and cognitive responses
• lecture content adapted continuously to incorporate field experience

Student agency was structural from the outset. The lecturer explicitly positioned herself as a facilitator rather than a guide, seeking, as she put it, “to ensure an equitable space where every voice could emerge.”  Each student conducted their own interview, chose their own narrative approach, authored their own poetic text, and co-shaped the content of the Decalogue and the e-book. The involvement of students from the Music Education course in transforming the collected life stories into musical compositions illustrates how the flexibility of the project enabled an organic evolution beyond its original design, fostering the integration of different disciplines and expanding opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and collaboration across university courses.

Reflection was woven into every phase of the project, functioning not merely as an evaluative tool but as a core pedagogical practice through which students made meaning of their experience. 

• Before service: Before the first visit, the lecturer prepared students on SL methodology. This preparation ensured they had already reflected on what it means to enter a community as learners rather than experts. Questions of power, mutual respect, and the ethics of authentic listening was discussed in advance, building the relational disposition the project required.
• During service: After each of the four visits, the full LUMSA group, comprising both students and lecturer, dedicated a structured oral reflection moment: students shared observations, emotions, and questions that had emerged, describing what had happened and what had stayed with each of them. “¿Qué te Pa’?” (see Section 3) was used jointly by students and elderly participants to articulate what had struck each person most. World Café provided a facilitated group dialogue format. Finally, the Truth Thermometer allowed individual emotional gauging alongside group discussion.
• After service: Written reflection was embedded in two project outputs. Section 5 of the e-book, entitled “La voce dei protagonisti” (“The Voice of the Protagonists”), gathered students’ reflections on the experience and its transformative effects. Section 6 contained the Decalogue: a shared civic document that was itself the product of collective reflection across generations. Students also produced individual handwritten reflections. The combination of oral, written, collective, and individual formats supported both cognitive and emotional processing. 

Role of reflection in learning:  

Reflection enabled students to process the gap between theoretical knowledge of social inclusion and its embodied reality, and to develop metacognitive capacity. These cross-generational formats, and particularly the Decalogue and “¿Qué te Pa’?”, made reflection a shared civic act: both generations arrived at knowledge together, on equal terms.  One student’s testimony captures the shift in motivation: “I came to university more often for this project with the elderly centre than for lectures in all these years.” The lecturer recalled that this student said it with a smile, as if to underline that she had found, in that experience, a meaning and a reason to truly be there. 

The lecturer described the experience as “a generative passage, almost circular — an inheritance that renews itself”: she found herself facilitating, for the first time from the other side, the same type of experience that her own teachers had once made her live as a student. 

Evaluation combined teacher- and student-based practices with participatory and reflective approaches throughout the entire project. Structured self-reflection was integrated into every phase: students engaged in oral group reflection after each centre visit, contributed written reflections to section 5 of the e-book, and produced individual handwritten reflective outputs. The Decalogue served simultaneously as a civic product and as evidence of collaborative learning. Continuous qualitative feedback from the partner informed the ongoing development of the project throughout. The lecturer engaged in continuous metacognitive accompaniment, guiding students to reflect on the meaning of educational action, the ethics of service, and the dynamics of reciprocal learning. 

Values

• Valuing human dignity and human rights
• Valuing cultural diversity

Attitudes

• Civic-mindedness
• Openness to cultural otherness, to other beliefs, worldviews and practices
• Responsibility

Skills

• Analytical and critical thinking skills
• Co-operation skills
• Empathy
• Flexibility and adaptability
• Listening and observing skills

Knowledge and critical understanding

• Knowledge and critical understanding of the world

• Valuing human dignity and human rights: The project promoted the value of human dignity by recognising each life story as worthy of being heard, respected and valued. This process contributed to strengthening self-esteem and a sense of recognition, particularly among the older participants, while simultaneously fostering meaningful relationships, mutual learning and personal growth for all those involved.      
• Valuing cultural diversity: Generational diversity was conceived as a living cultural asset rather than a social divide. In this context, students had the opportunity to recognise older adults as valuable sources of knowledge, life experiences, memories, values and meanings shaped through lived experience.
• Civic-mindedness & empathy: direct contact with isolated elderly persons cultivated civic engagement and awareness of students’ role as active contributors to the common good. 
• Openness to cultural otherness: the intergenerational encounter required genuine suspension of judgement. A member of the senior center described it as “the convergence of opposites”, referring to the unexpected combination of AI, young students, and an elderly centre.  
• Responsibility: publicly representing others’ life stories created genuine ethical responsibility toward community partners and the social significance of the work; the lecturer observed the emergence of “professional ethics” as a lived disposition.
• Analytical and critical thinking: multiple reflection formats developed students’ capacity to analyse their own learning; each student independently designed their interview and authored their own poetic text.
• Co-operation skills & flexibility and adaptability: every element was negotiated across generational, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries.  
• Skills of listening and observing: free-form interviewing required following each narrator’s lead without imposing a fixed protocol, in a direct enactment of democratic listening.  
• Knowledge and critical understanding of the world: students developed grounded understanding of social isolation among elderly urban populations, digital exclusion dynamics, and how AI can serve as a pedagogical instrument of inclusion and intergenerational mediation.    

Through direct engagement with the community, students developed key transversal competences, including active listening, empathy, critical thinking, adaptability, creativity, and professional ethics. The experience also strengthened their sense of civic responsibility and social commitment, enabling them to recognise the public value of their contribution. Participation in the project enhanced motivation and engagement, leading to notably high attendance at every session. As the lecturer observed, the project demonstrated a particular “generative power” through its ability to bring people, emotions and motivation back into a shared and vibrant educational space. The course also strengthened students’ capacity for poetic writing as an educational instrument and for producing shared cultural outputs in collaboration with the community. 

The decision of one student to undertake an internship at the Senior Centre provides further evidence of how the learning outcomes achieved were translated into concrete civic engagement. The lecturer described this as “a moment that truly encapsulated the deepest meaning of the whole experience”: the president of the Centre announced publicly that one of the students had asked to do her internship there. As the lecturer reflected: “it was no longer just a matter of studying social inclusion, participatory design, or quality of life: it was a matter of living them, interpreting them, putting them into play in a concrete relationship.”

The Senior Centre gained a lasting cultural asset through the e-book Trame di vita, which became part of the community’s collective memory, helping to preserve and celebrate the stories gathered during the project. The experience strengthened participants’ self-esteem and sense of recognition, as well as that of all those involved. As the community partner observed, the project fostered self-esteem “not only among the elderly, but in all participants”, noting this as an important effect that can often be lacking in such environments. As one member of the Senior Centre stated, the group was “proud to have collaborated with the university.”  

The project received international academic recognition: the scientific contribution Tejiendo voces entre generaciones: historias de vida y Aprendizaje-Servicio con Inteligencia Artificial (“Weaving Voices Across Generations: Life Stories and Service-Learning with Artificial Intelligence”) was awarded the Laura Rubio Prize at the ApSU13 Conference in Bilbao for excellence in the ethical dimension of social intervention to Irene Culcasi (course teacher, LUMSA) and Valentina Furino (doctoral researcher, LUMSA). The project also received institutional recognition: the active participation of senior LUMSA figures in the final public event of 13 May 2025 signals a concrete institutional endorsement of the service-learning model and of community-engaged teaching as a valued dimension of the university’s third mission. As the lecturer observed, such participation “carries great symbolic value: it communicates that the university believes in a culture of encounter, social responsibility, and integral formation.” At that same event, the lecturer described how some of the elderly participants had invited their own grandchildren, who arrived with flowers in hand for their grandparents: “a simple gesture, but of enormous symbolic power. The room was filled with emotion, mutual recognition, and a sense of belonging.” 

Remarkably, the community partner reported no difficulties whatsoever: “None. It will seem strange, but none.”  This absence of friction testifies to the authentic alignment of interests and the quality of co-design from the outset. The tensions that did emerge were structural rather than relational, including the need to balance structure with necessary flexibility, and the hybrid modality of university lectures, which made physical attendance uneven across students. The wish to spend more time, allowing for the full depth of exchange originally envisioned: the community partner wished to hear students’ own stories, not only have elderly participants tell theirs. Both the lecturer and the community partner described these tensions not as obstacles but as integral parts of what makes Service-Learning authentic, namely conditions that generated precisely the civic and professional learning the course aimed to develop. 

• Genuine community need voiced by the community itself, rather than being identified for it. As the lecturer noted from this experience: “when the community’s need is real and deeply felt, the project starts with a generative force of its own — energy and engagement emerge naturally, because there is a shared sense of purpose sustaining every phase of the work.”  
• Institutional recognition for lecturers, meaning formal recognition of their community engagement activities (third mission) and students (credits, certifications).  
• Accessible physical and symbolic spaces within the university.  
• Sufficient time, at minimum one academic year, for trust-building and co-design.  
• Lecturer disposition of facilitation rather than direction.  
• Institutional leadership visibility: senior figures participating in public restitution events signal that the university as an institution endorses a culture of encounter and social responsibility.  
• Flexibility within structure: as the community partner observed, “it is good not to introduce too much rigidity without losing sight of the objective — if the element of creative cooperation is maintained, this favours a good outcome.” An overly rigid approach to co-design would have foreclosed the organic evolution, including the unexpected integration of music, that made this project distinctive.