Educazione Civica Digitale: una formazione pilota per gli insegnanti della Scuola Primaria

The focus of the present work is the "Digital Civic Education: A Hypothesis for Primary Schools" project. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan – through its Research Centres on Media and Communication (OssCom) and Media Education for Innovation and Technology (Cremit) – carried out an experimental research-intervention on behalf of CORECOM Regione Lombardia. The project involved 232 teachers from 10 schools in the provinces of Milano, Varese, Monza Brianza, Como, Lodi, Brescia, and Sondrio.\r\nThe project is a combination of educational intervention and research. The object of the intervention was the training of primary school teachers on teaching digital citizenship, whereas the research aimed at collecting data and evidence on basic digital skills, with a focus on the online experience of the actors involved in the training process (students, teachers, parents). In particular, the experimental project wanted to investigate digital competences (Ranieri, 2022) and possible consequences on the well-being of younger generations that the process of digitalisation may entail (Aroldi, 2016).\r\nThe topic of media in schools emerges in an organic and significant way: technologies represent a powerful means to help schools become communities of practice (Wenger, 2006), characterised by a high reflexive value and able to provide new generations with a set of skills, knowledge, and competences to face today's challenges (Livingstone, 2010). According to its main aspects, digital citizenship can be declined as identity, participation, and a set of rights and responsibilities (Silverstone, 2009). Thus, the digital becomes a space for experimenting with active citizenship as it requires the implementation of transversal skills to respond to everyday situation-problems (Fabiano, 2020).\r\nThe basis of the project are the Digital Civic Education Curriculum (MIUR, 2018) and Law 92/2019 on Civic Education, that consider digital citizenship as one of the three pillars on which to build the 33 transversal hours of the new teaching together with constitution and sustainable development (Guidelines, 2020). These two documents suggest a rethinking of the digital in schools, moving from a disciplinary logic to a transversal model, distributing media-educational competences among the different disciplines of the Curriculum (Pasta&Rivoltella, 2022).\r\nThe Curriculum was used as the starting point to investigate five main areas related to the exercise of an active, aware, and responsible digital citizenship (Rivoltella, 2020): the Internet and the ongoing change, media education, information education, quantification and computation (data and artificial intelligence), digital culture and creativity.\r\nWith this perspective, the Curriculum suggests building positive strategies that enable students and teachers in training to deal with a liquid communicational landscape (Bauman, 2019) that requires relating critically, ethically, and aesthetically in, with, for, and through media (Rivoltella, 2019).\r\nThis being the premise, it is crucial to ask the following question: how to help citizens being aware of the importance of the cultural heritage in community life and of the need for its protection and enhancement? (Panciroli, 2019).\r\nThe teachers involved in this project could benefit from a 30-hour blended course, which combined an online part intended as a pilot MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), and a face-to-face part. The course offered:\r\n- significant contents delivered in online modules and then uploaded on the BlackBoard LMS platform;\r\n- face-to-face training sessions lead by expert trainers in which teachers took part in two APGs (Guided Practical Activities) that required a small group planning of teaching interventions based on the principles of authentic tasks and aimed at developing and promoting digital skills in students.\r\nOn an educational-didactic level, each group of teachers drew their own project framework and created related artefacts to make their proposal useful in the classroom, digitally augmenting it thanks to ad hoc apps.\r\nWorking on a common and conscious project led to the creation of a real immersive and virtual didactic museum, with artefacts produced by all the schools, thanks to the use of Artsteps (https://www.artsteps.com/ ), an online platform that combines reflection and narration and documents practices as well as the sharing of knowledge (Rivoltella, 2021) proper of a community of practice.\r\nFor this reason, it is of fundamental importance to provide training for digital citizens, especially future ones. This requires not only adequate material resources (such as easily accessible devices and connections), but also precise and clear competences to make the most out of them (Golberg, 2018).\r\nIt is evident, therefore, that the pathways related to 'digital citizenship' skills cannot be limited to provide licences and certifications of the abilities to use devices or software, although they will necessarily have to emphasise the computational aspects of reality, the emergence of big data, and the development of artificial intelligence systems (Pasta&Marangi&Rivoltella, 2021).\r\nCreating cultural artefacts, including technological ones, is part of the manifestation of the individual's creative process, as an act of pleasure, which gives our thinking space for action, promoting fluidity of ideas and their creativity (Berthoz, 2021). The designed products and the technological artefacts were, therefore, conceived and created by the trainees to respond to a need for innovation linked to a demand for the redesigning of teaching intervention from a media-educational perspective.\r\nThis work provides feedback on the first part of the research as well as the data that were collected.