Lidia Casado Ledesma | Enrico Ravera | Cosimo Di Bari | Christian Tarchi

Cultivating life skills through 

reflective writing in higher education

An educational guide for teaching and learning

Writing is a fundamental skill, essential for learning, reflection, persuasion, recording information, and creative expression. Writing practices are today anchored to digital spaces, thus digital writers need to learn to produce dynamic and interactive texts. Opportunities to engage expressively, creatively, and practically in writing are unequally distributed even in higher education. Given the importance that writing plays in students’ knowledge acquisition, lifelong learning and, ultimately, reflective citizenship, writing should be an integral part of the learning process throughout a student’s education.

This book, born from the ORWELL project, co-funded by the European Union, addresses this gap by promoting digital writing competencies. We propose writing as a tool to nurture higher education students’ life skills development.

Divided into five parts, the book covers essential life skills, personal development, social skills, and learning strategies, concluding with essays on the pedagogical role of writing. This comprehensive guide is a valuable resource for educators and students aiming to improve writing competencies and life skills.

Lidia Casado Ledesma (University of Florence) is a postdoctoral researcher. Her dissertation was about the connections between argumentative writing and dialogic activities. Her research areas are related to writing, multiple text comprehension and instructional design in academic contexts. She has always been linked to the practice of writing, professionally through research and personally through narrative writing.

Christian Tarchi (University of Florence), Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology. He is an expert in reading comprehension and argumentative writing, with a focus on digital environments. He is a lecturer in School Psychology and Developmental and Educational Psychology at the school of psychology and the school of education. He has coordinated two European projects on digital reading (EMILE, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and digital writing (ORWELL, funded by the European Union).

Enrico Ravera (University of Florence), Associate Professor of General and Inorganic Chemistry, lectures in Introductory General Chemistry in the School of Sciences and in the School of Agricultural Sciences. He has co-authored two introductory chemistry textbooks, as well as specialized monographs.

Cosimo Di Bari (University of Florence), Associate Professor of General and Social Pedagogy, teaches Methodologies of Educational Research, Pedagogy of Narrative and Media and Theories of Communicative and Formative Processes. His research topics include Media Education, sports pedagogy, pedagogy of difference, and philosophy of education. He is involved in popularization with several journals and is author of the Italian magazine for parents UPPA.