Teenager as Co-Evaluators of the Learning City

to responsibility toward the community and to the role of young people in the city. Some students framed this shift in identity terms: “I don’t just feel like someone who participates; I feel like someone who can have a say,” or “I realized that we can also explain to adults what doesn’t work.” Narratives of civic awareness (e.g., “understanding neighborhood needs,” “seeing who is excluded”) and self-efficacy (e.g., feeling capable of proposing changes or engaging in dialogue with adults and institutions) were more frequent in this group. In contrast, students in the control group more often interpreted service-learning as part of the school pathway or as an “interesting project,” with fewer references to agency and to the possibility of influencing the urban context. In several interviews, students expressed a sense of “limited usefulness”: “We helped, but then everything goes back to how it was,” or “It felt more like volunteering than citizenship,” suggesting that the absence of structured reflection and evaluative framing reduced the capacity to link experience with transformation. Comparison of educator interviews further reinforced this interpretation. Educators working with the experimental group described the pathway as a device capable of enhancing the quality of participation—not merely operational involvement, but students’ ability to argue, ask questions, critically read urban opportunities, and formulate recommendations. On a personal level, several educators expressed positive surprise at the competences that emerged: “When we give them tools, they observe things much more subtly than we do,” or “They named www.ijee.io things that we, as adults, tend to normalize.” The most frequently reported effect concerned a shift in students’ posture—from recipients to competent interlocutors—accompanied by perceived improvements in motivation and responsibility within group work. Some educators described this as a change in the educational relationship itself: “I didn’t have to push them; they were the ones asking to understand and to give feedback,” or “They felt taken seriously, and that made the difference.” Educators working with the control group, while recognizing the educational value of urban curricular activities, more often highlighted challenges related to organizational sustainability (time constraints, school requirements, coordination with community actors) and reported more heterogeneous outcomes. They emphasized that, in the absence of systematic moments of reflection and re-elaboration, some students tended to experience urban learning as episodic or weakly connected to their civic identity. Explicitly, some educators stated: “If there’s no space to stop and reflect, it remains just one activity among many,” or “I see enthusiasm in the moment, but it struggles to consolidate over time.” Overall, the qualitative comparison between students and educators across the two groups suggests that the participatory evaluation pathway functioned as an educational “amplifier” of urban learning. It made dimensions of inclusivity and accessibility more visible, supported the construction of deeper civic meanings, and fostered self-representations as subjects capable of contributing to the community. At a subjective level, this was reflected in expressions of greater legitimation and agency among students in the experimental group—such as “Now I know what to look for and how to say it,” or “I feel part of the city, not just someone who uses it”— whereas narratives in the control group were more closely tied to the school experience, as in “It was useful, but I don’t know if it really changes the city.” This qualitative outcome is consistent with the study’s theoretical hypothesis: the impact of Learning Cities depends not only on the provision of opportunities, but also on the existence of devices that help young people interpret, evaluate, and renegotiate their urban experiences through a participatory lens. 6. Discussion The quantitative and qualitative findings converge in indicating that participation in the participatory evaluation pathway produced an additional educational effect beyond mere “curricular” exposure to urban learning experiences. The differences observed in standardized measures—mean increases ranging between approximately +15% and +20% in civic participation and sense of community, with a particularly strong advantage in the upper response ranges for agency and active participation—are explained by the qualitative data. Students in the experimental group not only experienced urban activities, but learned to interpret them through analytical categories (accessibility, recognition, inclusivity, invisible barriers) and to transform these interpretations into arguments and recommendations. In this sense, participatory evaluation appears to have functioned as a form of “pedagogical mediation,” making urban learning experiences more conscious, reflective, and translatable into civic competences. This finding confirms that the most significant outcomes of service- learning and action-oriented civic education depend on the presence of structured opportunities for critical reflection and feedback (Eyler & Giles, 1999). A key element emerging from the comparison between groups concerns the differing quality of participation. While participation in the control group tended to remain anchored to the event or project itself (“we did...,” “it was useful/interesting”), participation in the experimental group took on a more intentional and meaning-oriented dimension (“what makes this space educational,” “who is it really accessible to,” “what could be changed”). This shift is consistent with the idea that civic learning does not depend solely on action per se, but on the capacity to attribute public meaning to action and to connect it to a critical reading of context. In other words, the intervention appears to have supported a transformation from a www.ijee.io form of citizenship that is merely “lived” to one that is “thought through and articulated,” in which young people develop the language and tools to name both what works and what produces exclusion. In particular, the qualitative findings suggest that the experience of acting as young evaluators made visible dimensions that are often overlooked by macro-structural indicators: symbolic barriers, perceptions of legitimacy (e.g., “feeling authorized”), implicit rules, and adult-centric languages. Although these aspects are less easily measurable, they are crucial for understanding the actual inclusiveness of the Learning City, as they directly affect young people’s ability to move through and inhabit urban spaces as learning environments. From this perspective, participatory evaluation did not merely measure the Learning City, but contributed to the construction of shared awareness regarding the everyday forms of inclusion and exclusion that shape adolescents’ urban experiences. At the same time, the fact that perceived influence shows more modest differences than belonging and emotional connection points to a structural limitation: agency can be strengthened at the personal and relational levels, but perceptions of influencing urban decision-making processes also depend on the real openness of institutions and the availability of authentic spaces for participation (Checkoway, 2011). In this sense, the findings highlight a tension that is typical of youth participation initiatives: young people may develop critical interpretive tools and feel more competent, but if they do not encounter genuine channels of listening and institutional recognition, participation risks remaining confined to a “formative” experience without full translation into public impact. This issue is particularly relevant for the governance of Learning Cities, as it suggests that strengthening youth agency requires not only educational interventions, but also organizational and political conditions that make interg