This contribution responds to the call to conceptualize new horizons to broaden the perspectives of the relationship between research, art and education. The proposal specifically concerns adolescents and the challenge of engaging a segment of them, often the most vulnerable, in art-mediated pedagogy.
The construct of seeing without being seen, a recurring theme in myths, has recently (Lancini, 2025) become a key to understanding the emotional state of adolescents in the current context. Indeed, they are immersed in a stark contrast between the spectacularization of more superficial phenomena, which corresponds to an "invisibility" of the emotions they experience most authentically and which are not truly heard.
The paucity of studies on adolescents only confirms this difficult regime of visibility. This gap is particularly acute when discussing youth artistic enjoyment (rather than its production) and when distancing ourselves from market research in which adolescents are listened to solely as consumers.
This proposal focuses on watching theatre (rather than making theatre) to reflect on adolescence today and the implications of a different approach, including in pedagogical and artistic discourse. The hypothesis we seek to demonstrate is that studying spectatorship can be a keystone. This broadened focus highlights four directions.

1. The invisibility of a significant segment of adolescents who do not participate in performance workshops, due to a difficult relationship with their bodies and emotions, often conditioned by gender stereotypes about men. Very often, these same adolescents fit into the category of though guys well characterized by Bertolini (1993/2015). Indeed, unless there are specific projects in juvenile detention centers or communities activated by particular projects, the workshop primarily engages students who attend high schools and who come from families with fewer problems of economic or social vulnerability.
2. The pedagogical importance of being within invisible dimensions, especially considering how necessary it is to reflect on visibility in light of developmental psychology and phenomenological observations related to social media. Instagram, for example, documents a strong tendency to see (many followers) without being seen (or to be seen through ephemeral images): few posts, profile pictures that hide the face, communication through stories that last 24 hours at most.
3. The fruitfulness of a more focused study on seeing is confirmed by some insights from the literature that has timidly attempted to highlight this trend. For example, the initial results of the neurocognitive approach with the theory of mirror neurons applied to spectatorship in the studies of Omasta (2011), and Sedgman's (2018) theory on the rules of theater as a barrier for young people, especially when it comes to boys and girls outside the white, lower-middle-class canon.
4. The need to move beyond stereotypes of seeing as a necessarily passive action (Ranciere) and of studying the audience as a practice necessarily tied to marketing (Reinelt, 2014).

This phenomenon confirms that the construct of visibility must be studied for its consequences in both the educational sphere (for example, in teacher training) and the artistic sphere. In an era marked by the collapse of the disciplinary system in favour of the semi-technical media system (Barone 2021), intensifying our focus on the gaze of adolescents becomes essential for delving deeper into both artistic and pedagogical discourse.

This contribution draws on the doctoral research project. It focuses on qualitative research methodologies. Given the lack of existing frameworks for studying the theatrical spectator as a pedagogical subject, it was necessary to develop a theoretical framework by selecting literature from semiotics, theatre studies, pedagogy and philosophy of education, sociology and developmental psychology, and digital ethnography. The selection criteria were those most relevant to a very specific and understudied research object. The chosen research question confirms the initial hypothesis, connected to the invitation to challenge the limits of educational research in the arts. The hypothesis to be confirmed is that theatrical spectatorship can be a more inclusive and generative field of research in the current historical and research context. Indeed, it has privileged childhood, children, or performance workshops conducted by individual artistic entities, with the result that theatrical spectatorship has been less observed and studied and has produced less educational and scholastic research, and probably also artistic research. Certainly, this has been influenced by a certain prejudice toward viewing it as a passive activity and a certain difficulty in studying adolescence, as it is a more difficult period to define and intercept, especially in contexts of greater educational poverty.

The aim is to demonstrate that the theme of seeing without being seen is crucial to research. Specifically, an investment in adolescents' theatrical spectatorship can benefit both educational and artistic discourses, becoming, for example, a good practice to be incorporated into the training of teachers or educational staff who propose projects with young people with greater social vulnerability. The expected outcome is a framework that can frame the pedagogical dimension of adolescents who enjoy an artistic product within a specific and situated context such as traditional prose theater. The four directions listed in the paper's description can generate four axes that justify a new educational and artistic investment aimed at better understanding and describing adolescence, leveraging a new perspective on working with young people.

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