Del pacto al contrato: negociación, comunidad y Queer Media Education en la escuela conectada

The pedagogical reading of contemporary media practices and of the onlife condition reveals a widening fracture between formal and informal educational settings, with significant effects on the symbolic and cultural transmission between young people and adults (Floridi, 2015; Buckingham, 2019; Rivoltella, 2020). In the connected school this fracture takes the form of a structural tension between the implicit pacts and the explicit contracts that regulate the educational relationship, particularly where digital media shape identities, knowledge and social bonds. Educational silences around gender and sexuality are read here not as curricular omissions but as pedagogical discontinuities: they delegate formative functions to media environments that lie outside any process of educational negotiation, weakening adult responsibility and eroding the sense of school community. The chapter takes this fracture as a central pedagogical problem and addresses it by reconfiguring the school relationship in terms of negotiation, co-responsibility and community. The notion of the pedagogical contract (Meirieu, 1996; Lo Jacono, 2019) is used to make educational aims explicit and to articulate norms, expectations, rights and duties within an intergenerational dialogue, in contrast to tacit and often asymmetrical agreements. Media education thus ceases to be a set of technical competences and becomes a space of curricular and cultural negotiation. Drawing on critical pedagogy, queer studies and media education, the chapter proposes Queer Media Education (Messina, 2025) as a theoretical and practical perspective that interrogates dominant norms, renders differences visible and opens dialogue on identities, affects and embodiment, sustaining media literacy oriented toward social justice, inclusion and recognition.