Children’s socialization, involved parenting, and the construction of the family-school partnership in everyday family interactions: a study on parent-assisted homework as a morally dense educational arena

This study investigates an activity that takes place at the intersection between family and school and plays a key role in the building of the family-school partnership largely promoted by education policies: parent-assisted homework. Even though this topic is not new in pedagogical research, what is innovative about this study is the focus on naturally occurring parent-child conversations during homework. Adopting a phenomenological approach to the study of educational events and relying on conversation analysis, the present study analyzes 62 video-recorded sessions of parent-assisted homework collected in 19 Italian families with children aged 6-10 years old (i.e., attending primary school). The analysis of parent-child interactions reveals that parent-assisted homework is not only a site for formal learning but also and primarily a morally dense educational arena. Through the ‘small talks’ that accompany the completion of homework exercises, parents and children evoke and co-construct moral ideologies concerning topics as diverse as learning, school rules and standards, ‘good, involved parenting’, the family-school partnership, children’s autonomy, virtue, time management, and the organization of knowledge and authority in interaction. By taking part in everyday homework interactions, children are educated to culture-specific ethical systems and socialized into morally competent members of their communities, while parents implement the family-school partnership and comply with the model of “involved parent” proposed by pedagogical research and policies. Providing empirical evidence for the moral and educational relevance of ordinary family talk, this study contributes to pedagogical research on family life and promotes parents’ reflexivity about their mundane interactive activities.

Connecting works of art within the semantic web of symbolic meanings

My doctoral research is about the modelling of symbolism in the cultural heritage domain, and on connecting artworks based on their symbolism through knowledge extraction and representation techniques. In particular, I participated in the design of two ontologies: one models the relationships between a symbol, its symbolic meaning, and the cultural context in which the symbol symbolizes the symbolic meaning; the second models artistic interpretations of a cultural heritage object from an iconographic and iconological (thus also symbolic) perspective. I also converted several sources of unstructured data, a dictionary of symbols and an encyclopaedia of symbolism, and semi-structured data, DBpedia and WordNet, to create HyperReal, the first knowledge graph dedicated to conventional cultural symbolism. By making use of HyperReal's content, I showed how linked open data about cultural symbolism could be utilized to initiate a series of quantitative studies that analyse (i) similarities between cultural contexts based on their symbologies, (ii) broad symbolic associations, (iii) specific case studies of symbolism such as the relationship between symbols, their colours, and their symbolic meanings. Moreover, I developed a system that can infer symbolic, cultural context-dependent interpretations from artworks according to what they depict, envisioning potential use cases for museum curation. I have then re-engineered the iconographic and iconological statements of Wikidata, a widely used general-domain knowledge base, creating ICONdata: an iconographic and iconological knowledge graph. ICONdata was then enriched with automatic symbolic interpretations. Subsequently, I demonstrated the significance of enhancing artwork information through alignment with linked open data related to symbolism, resulting in the discovery of novel connections between artworks. Finally, I contributed to the creation of a software application. This application leverages established connections, allowing users to investigate the symbolic expression of a concept across different cultural contexts through the generation of a three-dimensional exhibition of artefacts symbolising the chosen concept.