Teaching practices in the Covid-19 emergency. The Italia teachers' perspective

Due to the global pandemic, schools in most countries were forced to adopt distance teaching as an emergency solution. For a while it was the only strategy capable of permitting learners to go on being taught during the lockdown. Since it had a relevant and dramatic impact on society, a national survey of this experience was carried out to understand the opposing tensions animating the various school stakeholders during this on-going emergency. The work presented here aims at describing the concrete responses set in motion by Italian teachers to ensure didactic continuity, guarantee the educational needs emerging as a result of the digitisation of teaching, the strengths and criticalities of the experience. It describes, in particular, the experience of the teachers, paying specific attention to their professional and emotional experience and the teaching practices they applied during the emergency. The data collected yielded an image of a teaching staff the outcome of group-destiny rather than group-project, the product of Italy’s rather self-referential type of school where the opportunities for internal and external collaboration at organisational level continues to be episodic and distributed in a patchy manner throughout the country