The present contribution discusses reflections and findings from a doctoral research by focusing on how qualitative and arts-based tools can foster critical thinking and reflexive awareness among educational professionals and young people involved in educational projects. The study is situated within an action research framework, understood as a cyclical and transformative process in which knowledge emerges through practice, reflection, and collective inquiry (McNiff, 2013, 2017). Within this perspective, arts-based methodologies are examined both as research tools and as pedagogical practices capable of supporting processes of agency, meaning-making, and critical engagement in educational contexts.

Specifically, the contribution addresses the following research question: How do qualitative and arts-based tools contribute to the development of critical thinking among educational professionals and young people within action research processes?

At a formative level, the study aims to support educational professionals in developing critically reflective practices and to create participatory spaces in which young people can articulate their perspectives using multimodal languages. At an epistemic level, the research seeks to generate situated knowledge on how critical thinking is enacted, negotiated, and transformed through reflective and aesthetic practices (Burbules, 2023).

The theoretical framework integrates three strands. First, action research conceptualizes research as an ethical and political practice oriented toward change (McNiff & Whitehead, 2011). Second, reflective practice positions the educational professional as a subject who learns through critical engagement with experience, emotions, and uncertainty (Schön, 1986; Brookfield, 1995). Third, arts-based research recognize artistic languages as epistemic resources that enable meaning-making beyond purely verbal forms (Eisner, 2008; Leavy, 2018).

Within this framework, critical thinking is then understood as a situated, relational, and embodied process, emerging through dialogue, reflexivity, and aesthetic exploration (Dewey, 1938; Biesta, 2015).

Concerning the research field, this process was carried out within a participatory research laboratory, the B-YOUth Forum at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy), composed each year of approximately fifteen young people. The laboratory was structured through regularly scheduled weekly meetings held between February and October 2024, with the exception of the summer period (June–August).

Through their participation, young people gradually approached scientific research by engaging with different university laboratories and research environments. These experiences were consistently mediated by the presence of a pedagogical facilitator, whose role was to bridge different forms of knowledge, stimulate critical questioning, and connect research practices to participants’ personal and everyday life experiences.

Two main qualitative and reflexive tools were employed: moodboards as arts-based tools (Velasquez-Posada, 2019; Munk et al., 2020) and a reflexive research diary (Pastori, 2017). While moodboards were used regularly by both participants and the pedagogical facilitator, the research diary was used exclusively by the pedagogical facilitator as a reflexive and analytical tool. For the participants, moodboards were introduced as facilitative, arts-based tools to support reflective processes and the development of critical thinking. At regular intervals, participants created and revisited their moodboards, which were repeatedly modified, reworked, re-narrated, and re-shared over time. This temporal openness enabled participants to reflect on changes in their perspectives, experiences, and relational positioning, supporting non-linear and processual forms of meaning-making (Ratotti et al., 2025). Such longitudinal engagement strengthened the democratic and transformative potential of the method, allowing young people to engage critically with dominant norms while exercising agency within a shared space of inquiry, dialogue, and participation. For the pedagogical facilitator, a professional research diary was used longitudinally to document educational actions, critical incidents, emotional responses, and emerging questions. Analysis of diary entries revealed progressive shifts in professional positioning, particularly regarding power relations and assumptions about youth participation. This reflexive process supported a move from more directive to dialogical educational practices, illustrating how critical thinking developed through sustained self-interrogation (Brookfield, 2017). Moodboards also functioned as mediating artifacts within group discussions, facilitating critical expression around themes such as identity, recognition, and belonging. As one participant noted, “With the images I can say things I don’t know how to explain with words”, (Audio record, 30/05/2024) while another observed, “Looking at everyone’s moodboards made me realize that we experience the same space very differently” (Audio record, 08/10/2024). These excerpts illustrate how moodboards enabled critical comparison, self-reflection, and collective sense-making (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Data analysis followed a thematic-reflexive approach, focusing on moments of disruption, re-framing, and emerging critical awareness across action research cycles (Van Manen, 1990).

This doctoral research highlights that qualitative and arts-based methodologies can function as powerful democratic devices, activating critical and imaginative forms of thinking that operate across both professional practice and youth participation. In contrast to neoliberal performative logics that reduce education to measurable outcomes, efficiency, and individual optimization, the study reconceptualizes democracy as a lived educational practice grounded in plurality, uncertainty, and collective meaning-making (Del Rey, 2018). At the professional level, the research diary emerged as a critical-democratic tool that enabled educators to slow down practice, resist instrumental rationalities, and reclaim spaces for judgement, doubt, and ethical responsibility (Hewitt, 2017). Through sustained action–reflection cycles (McNiff, 2012), as foreseen by the methodology, critical thinking took the form of professional subjectivation: a process through which educators repositioned themselves as democratic agents. For young people, moodboards functioned as aesthetic, epistemic, and political artifacts that disrupted dominant narratives of success, normality, and self-optimization. Crucially, the transformative power of moodboards resided in their temporal openness: being revisited, reworked, and re-narrated over time, they sustained provisional, relational, and potential unfinished meanings. More broadly, the action research framework itself operated as a democratic counter-space to neoliberal performativity by valuing process over outcomes and participation over performance. By sustaining collective inquiry, disagreement, and re-orientation, the research affirmed democracy as an ongoing, experimental practice of education (Säfström & Biesta, 2023; Apple et al., 2022). Ultimately, this study advances the view that critical thinking is not a transferable skill but a political and ethical practice of being and becoming. When education makes space for uncertainty, imagination, and relational responsibility, it does more than resist neoliberal logics: it reclaims democracy as something that is not taught or measured, but continuously lived, negotiated, and reinvented within educational relationships (Biesta, 2011; Brown, 2015; Laval & Vergne, 2021).

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