Cultural Sustainability: Soft Competences, Identity and Digital STEAM Education for Inclusive Citizenship in Primary School

Starting from the assumption that, in contemporary debate, sustainability should increasingly be interpreted within a sociological paradigm, this contribution aims to analyse the soft competences required for the education of a citizen capable of developing an ethical and inclusive orientation, understood as a civic prerequisite for processes of sociocultural integration. From this perspective, sustainability is not considered solely as a set of environmental practices or public policies, but rather as a cultural and normative dispositive that structures habitus, representations and models of action. The progressive acquisition of knowledge, values and practices oriented towards sustainability, both at the individual and collective levels, makes it possible to frame this phenomenon as a constitutive dimension of processes of modernisation and sociocultural development. Such processes are frequently supported and accelerated by technological innovation, which acts as an enabling but not determining factor. Moving beyond deterministic interpretations of a technological, political or economic nature, the analysis adopts a culturalist perspective that emphasises the social construction of a sustainable identity, namely an identity that assumes sustainability as a regulative principle of everyday action and as a lifestyle for the contemporary citizen. This trajectory implies the active and inclusive involvement of agencies of socialisation, first and foremost the school institution, called upon to promote sustainability as a foundational value of social inclusion and community cohesion. Within this framework, the second part of the contribution explores sustainability education through the implementation of a design protocol for digital education within STEAM disciplines, placing particular emphasis on methodologies and tools such as coding and educational robotics, understood as pedagogical tools for the development of critical, collaborative and socially responsible competences.