Planned Courses a.y. 2025/26
| Course Title | Distribution during the doctoral cycle | Course Description |
| 1. Linguistics | First Year | The Italian language qualification courses aim to acquire the necessary skills to carry out exchange activities with international academic institutions. The habilitating seminars will be held in an intensive format within the course facilities, in order to provide doctoral students with in-depth and up-to-date knowledge on the main topics related to language and its concrete manifestations across time and space. The seminars are intended to offer tools to initiate critical reflections functional to doctoral research. |
| 2. Computer Science | First Year | The course explores the strategic intersection between the humanities and new technologies. It emphasizes the potential of the interaction between these fields for human-centered innovation, one of the fundamental challenges of our time. The research areas covered include digital archives and libraries, new tools for literary analysis, interpretation and text processing, anthropological and ethical implications of techno-sciences, and databases for historical and cultural research. |
| 3. Academic English | Second Year Third Year | The course develops speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in the academic context, introducing advanced grammar points and basic concepts of Academic English in the field of academic research. The course Introduction: working with academic vocabulary (what is special about Academic English, key vocabulary in Academic English). Reading: researching texts for essays, skimming and scanning, identifying the sequence of ideas, understanding implicit meanings, inferring the meaning of words. Reading practice: prediction, skimming, scanning, deducing unknown words – working with philosophical texts. Writing: understanding how essays are organised, linking parts of a text: conjuctions and sentence connectors. The research article abstract (functions, content and organization, grammar and style, vocabulary). Academic presentations: discussion and presentation skills, using visual aids, handouts and notes, planning and delivering a topic in a presentation. |
| 4. Academic Writing | First Year | The seminar series aims to introduce the specific features of academic writing from the perspective of preparing scientific contributions and the doctoral thesis. It teaches the technique of synthesizing complex texts by identifying the hierarchy of their conceptual relevance. By the end of the seminar series, the student will have acquired knowledge and understanding of the methods for drafting an academic text. Furthermore, they will be required to apply these skills by producing a paper that is appropriate linguistically, editorially, and in terms of conceptual organization. |
| 5. Research methodology | First Year Second Year | The course aims to train PhD students on issues related to the design of doctoral research, with a specific focus on the educational field. Throughout the course, topics such as identifying research problems and objectives, constructing the theoretical framework, coding, data analysis, hypothesis testing, operational definitions, types of variables, and relationships between variables will be covered. Data collection methods, as well as qualitative and quantitative techniques that can be used in the development of the doctoral thesis project, will also be discussed. |
| 6. The Reggio Emilia Approach from Early Childhood to Lifelong Learning | Second Year Third Year | The course aims to deepen the educational philosophy of Reggio Emilia, known as Reggio Emilia Approach, internationally considered one of the most relevant educational perspectives in early childhood education. The course focuses on: The value attributed to creativity as a quality of human thinking, manifested in the atelier and the figure of the atelierista. The value of the theory-practice relationship symbolised by working teams. The role of teachers and pedagogistas. The value of reflection as a formative element represented by pedagogical documentation. Another connotative aspect of the course is the idea that teachers are also researchers, meaning that educators thought of as researchers who document their work and the children’s learning processes, exploring the multiple ways that children develop to interpret and make sense of reality. Another element is the image of the competent child, that is the idea that children are able to construct complex communications and interactions thanks to a plurality of languages. This quality of the Reggio Educational Philosophy has important consequences for the conceptualization of inclusive pedagogical aspects. In fact, children with special educational needs are allowed to explore a sense of agency by expressing themselves through multiple languages within an educational environment that embraces plurality and diversity. A final element is negotiated learning, or the process of negotiation between ideas and theories that allow children to co-construct their learning through social interaction. In fact, from continuous negotiation that takes into account the different perspectives developed by each child, it is possible to valorise the diverse abilities, ideas and strategies that emerge. |
| 7. Statistics | Second Year | The course aims to provide doctoral students the skills necessary to conduct basic and intermediate level statistical analysis in support of research in the humanities. To this end, opensource statistical packages are explored and used, and topics such as the use of statistics for descriptive purposes, as well as topics in inferential statistics and correlational models are explored in depth. During the course we will specifically explore: – The Theory of Hypothesis Testing. The stages of hypothesis testing. – The measurement scales – Interpreting the final result in a hypothesis test – Comparing two populations: t-test for independent samples; t-test for paired samples – The analysis of the relationship between two quantitative variables: the Pearson correlation coefficient – Building a model of the relationship between explanatory and predictor variables: regression analysis (simple linear regression and multiple linear regression) – Hierarchical regression for moderation analysis – Analysis of covariance structures. |
Other educational activities
| Teaching Title | Distribution during the doctoral cycle | Course Description |
| 1. Metaphor and epistemic injustice | The seminar analyzes the role of metaphors in legal thought and in the formation of legal knowledge. It explores how metaphors influence the interpretation of laws and norms, and their impact on theories of justice and legal practices. | |
| 2. Practical reason: Moral and social epistemology | The seminar aims to present the philosophical agenda of practical reason, which includes cutting-edge methods and topics at the intersection of practical reasoning, moral psychology, philosophy of action, ethical theory, and moral and social epistemology, with particular focus on constructivist theories of meta-normativity, authority, and first-person authority. | |
| 3. Research methodology | The seminar aims to explore research methodologies within the context of constructivism, including insights into qualitative and quantitative approaches, data analysis, and practical applications in various fields of study within the humanities. |