The innovation of practices as a historical objective of the Educational Avant-garde action has had its own programme within and through the methodologies which – in the last decade – have stimulated the school. They have animated it with a bottom-up approach, considering it a complex, articulated, dynamic socio-cultural habitat.

The research will focus on the curriculum designed and the curriculum used, administering a series of guiding questions to allow the level of information to be more detailed at various times. The curriculum designed returns the propositional dimension and the questions of meaning through which teachers formulate an innovative proposal in terms of knowledge and learning processes.

The curriculum used restores the operational development of the design dimension, and will allow focus to be placed on how teachers have organised and planned the training programme (setting; didactic design; sources and resources; didactic situations; methodologies). It will enable to check which tools have been used and how, and the stressors that emerged during training and co-planning of the curriculum. Above all, it will be possible to measure how teachers have achieved the target of meaning, and developed the processes of thought and action (to explore; reflect and understand; dialogue; problematise and conceptualise; know-how and knowledge); and, finally, how the results achieved have been observed and measured, including using self-assessment and peer evaluation.

Objectives

• OB1: To observe and describe the ability of secondary school teachers to make sense of educational action, the educational project and knowledge;
• OB2: To observe and describe how the mechanics of learning are implemented through thought processes (to explore; reflect and understand; dialogue; problematise and conceptualise) and know-how through skills;
• OB3: To measure how the training ecosystem works from the point of view of care and awareness through a syllabus of significant actions and behaviour.

Research questions

• Q1: How do teachers build an integrated curriculum based on innovation processes?
• Q2: How is the integrated curriculum applied in educational action on the basis of the Learning to Become reference framework?
• Q3: What role does the care paradigm play in Learning to Become experimentation?

The questions and the overall structure of the research project aim at generating change in effective terms on disciplinary and transversal teaching, promoting a reflection on the need to update the training programme of the lower and upper secondary school through the “integrated curriculum” paradigm.

An impact is expected on the reorganisation of curricula and their re-qualification in terms of educational innovation.

Recipients

313 teachers, as well as a sample of secondary school students in lower and upper secondary schools, and the head teachers of the Institutes participating in the experiment.