LIBRI DI PIER GIUSEPPE ROSSI

The current socio-cultural context calls for a rethinking of teaching and assessment practices to turn assessment into a continuous and pervasive process that takes into account not only the final outcome but also the processes and reflections that led the student to achieve that result, with a view to continuous improvement. The main shift from the past is achieved with the adoption of the ‘assessment as learning’ paradigm, in which the student becomes an active player in the assessment and meta-reflection processes. Assessment is no longer perceived as a mere bureaucratic fulfillment of the teacher, but as a shared tool between students and teachers to build the learning path together, co-define goals, and make explicit expectations and critical issues. The design of authentic, open-ended, challenging tasks and the co-design and sharing of assessment rubrics, useful not only to ensure objectivity but also to guide the student in carrying out the task and implementing self-assessment, gains centrality. This paper describes a research-training pathway on assessment, conducted in 2022 and aimed at primary and secondary school teachers in the Marche Region, in Italy. The experience allowed teachers to approach the assessment as learning processes and to practice them in their own classrooms. The analysis of the data, collected through quantitative and qualitative tools and related to lower secondary school teachers, shows an increased focus on student activation in assessment dynamics and an increased awareness of the relevance of self-assessment processes. We also gained valuable feedback useful in guiding future research perspectives to improve the proposal’s sustainability.

Il volume indaga la pianificazione dell’azione didattica entro contesti in cui dialogano e interagiscono attivamente saperi disciplinari e saperi pratici. Il testo si avvale delle pratiche, delle voci e delle riflessioni di docenti e studenti, esplicitate e condivise in percorsi di ricerca e formazione iniziale e in servizio. Dalla sistematizzazione delle produzioni dei docenti emergono le logiche sistemiche con cui muoversi nella macro e nella microprogettazione, e le proposte operative per una pianificazione flessibile, generativa, sostenibile, visibile e co-progettata con gli studenti.

La media education, anche se presente nelle indicazioni formali, è scarsamente attuata nella scuola italiana, limitata com’è a situazioni episodiche che trovano maggiore riscontro negli ambiti informali. Il volume entra in profondità nella varietà del quadro italiano, tra esperienze formali e informali, in diversi ambiti che vanno dall’infanzia agli adulti, valorizzando una ricchezza e un potenziale pronto per uscire dalle cornici sperimentali della ricerca e delle singole offerte formative locali per essere messa a disposizione dell’intera cittadinanza.

The complexity of the class context changes knowledge that, today, experiments more and more the ambiguity between global and local. Knowledge seems to aim at the construction of nets of modal meanings. Even the posture of teachers and students change and feedback is one of the aspects that can mostly affect learning by fostering the acceptance of reciprocal worlds present in the class context. In this direction, also feedback seems to change and from an informative structure, as proposed by Gagné, feedback is acquiring a generative rationale, that is, a structure able to open different interpretative perspectives. In the present contribution modalities of feedback collection are described such as Mentimeter.com and Google.com forms being used in different courses at the department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism at the University of Macerata. Those tools were used to valorise the students’ informal and non formal knowledge and to define personalized trajectories. Feedback surely was the tool able to bridge the students’ and teachers’ experience and knowledge towards the construction of a net of meanings built in context.

The didactical design is organized in different documents that are peculiar in the different countries. In Italy there id the school curriculum starting from the national guidelines for the pre-school, primary and middle school, and from the regulations for the high school. Then many teachers create yearly design documents for each discipline collaborating, at times, with colleague of parallel classes.  In this article, such yearly documents will be called “macro design”, while the design of the single work sessions (from 1 to 8 hours in class) will be called “micro design”. The complexity, finally, requires that macro and micro design are transponed and it is needed that a design artefact can be shared in class with students starting processes of co-design.The article analyses the role and the structure of the school curriculum in the current context, the relationships between the macro and micro design and, finally, the need of a transposition of the design artefacts to share the design with students.The article “the curriculum”, present in the same issue, is the logic premise of the present contribution.

The complexity of socio cultural contexts and, consequently, of the school requires an explicit planning that can offer the didactical action a rhizomatic and generative vision.In such direction the models of curriculum of the last century, often characterized by a linear logic, lost much of their efficacy and cannot have an impact any longer with the complexity of reality and of the group class.Reflecting on the curriculum means catching the characterizing elements of the current contexts at the pedagogical and didactical level and reflecting on the elements of continuity and discontinuity from the past that could facilitate the change from linear models to recursive models.  The present article is organized into two parts: in the first there is a comparison between the present and the past, while in the second there is a review of the main contributions that from the Seventies of the last century have provided the basis to define the role and the structure of the curriculum.The article “the curriculum, the macro design and the micro design, and the curriculum transposition, present in the same issue, is the logic continuation of the present contribution.

What is trust and how new technologies are changing or affecting the concept of trust? This publication offers insights from researchers working in educational technology and distance education, collected in the frame of the European FP-7 Marie-Curie People project “Stimulators and inhibitors of a culture of trust in educational interactions assisted by modern information and communication technology”, and provides examples of implications of trust for successful learning experiences in distance education. The research goal is to understand how trust has changed or is changing: this is related not only to the modification of the meaning, but also indicators upon which people built their judgements.

The subject of alignment is not new to the world of education. Today however, it has come to mean different things and to have a heuristic value in education according to research in different areas, not least for neuroscience, and to attention to skills and to the alternation framework.This paper, after looking at the classic references that already attributed an important role to alignment in education processes, looks at the strategic role of alignment in the current context, outlining the shared construction processes and focusing on some of the ways in which this is put into effect.Alignment is part of a participatory, enactive approach that gives a central role to the interaction between teaching and learning, avoiding the limits of behaviourism, which has a greater bias towards teaching, and cognitivism/constructivism, which focus their attention on learning and in any case, on that which separates a teacher preparing the environment and a student working in it.