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19 novembre 2021

The National Service Learning Festival opens in Mestre (and online). The starting date is November 24th

From Wednesday 24 to Friday 26 November the second edition of the National Service Learning Festival (SL) is scheduled in Venice Mestre (Museo del ‘900, via Giovanni Pascoli 11), an important training opportunity that head teachers and teachers will be able to follow in-person and on live streaming.

The didactic proposal of Service Learning promotes the design of learning paths aimed at creating a service that satisfies a real and felt need in the area. In this method, didactic activities are built starting from real problematic situations of the socio-economic context in which the school is located, and students are guided to carry out concrete actions in favour of the community. The initiatives undertaken must always provide for close collaboration with local institutions and aim at establishing a virtuous circle between classroom learning and solidarity service.

There are many examples of feasible activities: from sharing a piece of school land with the local community by involving pupils in an active learning path of care for green spaces, to entrusting students with the social animation of a summer stay for the elderly; from having children collect the caps of plastic containers to deliver them to a company that recycles them, to bringing children together with associations linked to the world of people with disabilities.

Including public service educational activities in the curriculum constitutes an added value for learning social and civic skills and for building an ethics of student responsibility. Numerous research studies have shown that Service Learning activities are functional to higher levels of inclusion, to improve self-esteem, motivation to study, participation in school activities and favour the acquisition of pro-social behaviours and active citizenship.

This approach, very widespread in the United States, Latin America and many European countries, is receiving increasing interest in Italy as well. A significant role for our schools is played by Indire in the context of Avanguardie Educative, the innovation movement which, among its various proposals, encourages precisely this type of experience. The Guidelines for the implementation of the idea Inside / outside the school – Service Learning offer a general theoretical framework, some operational indications for the realization and evaluation of the paths and a series of useful tools, as well as presenting an interesting showcase of practices.

The festival programme includes the interventions of the major international experts in Service Learning: Andrew Furco (University of Minnesota) will focus on the characteristics of SL in the United States, Nives Tapia (Latin American Center de Aprendizaje y Servicio) will outline the profile of the methodology in Latin America, Pilar Aramburuzabala (University of Madrid) will present the different forms of the pedagogical approach in Europe; Roser Batlle (Spanish Network of Aprendizaje-Servicio) and Juan Garcia Gutierrez (Universidad Nacional de Educación at Distancia in Madrid) will trace the characteristics of SL in time of Covid-19. We will talk with Italo Fiorin (EIS-Lumsa) and Mario Castoldi (University of Turin) about the Italian way to the SL and about the aspects of the evaluation. For Indire, the researcher Lorenza Orlandini will speak on Friday 26th and will talk about the future perspectives of the methodology.

The Festival is organized by the three S.I.E.S. teaching school hubs, “A. Spinelli “of Turin, I.I.S. “Montani” in Fermo, “Illuminati” high school campus in Atri (Te), in collaboration with the LUMSA – EIS “Educating to Encounter and Solidarity” Specialization School, and with the M9 – Museum of the 20th century in Mestre. During the Festival, the projects identified by the Scientific Technical Committee as particularly significant among those carried out in the three-year period 2019-2021 by the educational institutions united in the regional networks coordinated by the three teaching school hubs will be presented.

For information: info@slmediterraneo.it

 

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