RIs as knowledge-sparkling environment among the Ecosystems of Territorial Cohesion strategy: a study case about the social impact of the ITINERIS Project

The article presents a case study on how opening environmental Research Infrastructures (RIs) to new user groups—especially through collaboration among the Third Sector, schools, and municipalities—can increase social impact by tackling educational poverty in marginal areas. It reports a training-intervention within the ITINERIS project involving 34 students (ages 9–14) from Southern Salento who participated in hands-on lab experiences (“Hidden Biodiversity” at LifeWatch and “Sky Discovering” at ACTRIS). The work argues that experiential, supportive, curiosity-driven learning can strengthen STEM motivation and self-efficacy, but that scaling such interventions requires addressing infrastructural and systemic barriers through community co-design, needs assessments, and broader evaluation models that capture community-level effects beyond academic metrics.