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Ricerca per l'innovazione della scuola italiana

The Learning to Become programme of “Avanguardie Educative”

As part of the “Futures of Education” programme, UNESCO published the Reimagining our Futures Together report on 10 November 2021. A new social contract for education, created by an international commission after a consultation work that lasted about two years.

INDIRE, through the structure of Avanguardie Educative, has developed and launched – already in the spring of 2021 – the Learning to Become programme, a curricular experimentation for lower and upper secondary schools which currently involves, in a three-year course, 27 schools and about 350 teachers of all subjects.

It is an innovation and research programme on the curriculum and is configured as a system action that looks at the school in an overall and organic way, also intercepting the requests and policies of the Ministry of Education (School Regeneration Plan; The National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP).

Objectives

  • Configuring a new vision of the school to reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet.
  • Transforming the curriculum starting from a review of disciplinary paradigms and organizational processes.
  • Systematising curricular innovation through the network of Avanguardie Educative.

What is Learning to Become?

Learning to Become was conceived as a container of generative paradigms capable of redefining the perimeter of critical thinking, global consciousness and social intelligence around some clusters of the curriculum: knowledge; skills; human relations and the educational community; the relationship of the school with the world, with nature, with technologies, with common goods, with sustainable development.

Learning to Become aims to transform the closed secondary school system into an open horizon to be explored, navigated and renewed through a series of tools. Among the many: a new conception of ​​the curriculum; a different canon of knowledge; the mechanics of learning, as original methods of triggering and interpreting learning, knowledge and skills; the space-time variables, which in the school still represent a traditional constraint in the relationship between the space-classroom, the group-class and lesson timetables.

The programme we have launched is an opportunity to try to draw a border line between before and after the pandemic, to reimagine a new beginning and a different path for the post-Covid school, but above all to make available to all educational institutions concrete answers and solutions that emerge from new development models and that require an ability to intercept and plan the future of education.

The Learning to Become path offers to secondary schools – and together with them tries to rewrite – a perspective, a vision and a new design of their contents; it represents a map to read and interpret complexity according to an interdisciplinary approach, in order to move in the richness of knowledge and its hybridizations and contaminations (Humanities/ STEM).

Learning to Become uses a series of tools and methodologies to enhance the meaning and profession of teaching and to restore the relevance and practicality of learning processes; accompanies the ecological and digital transition to develop – within the school – a different educational and cultural context, made up of increasingly hybrid knowledge and transversal skills, but absolutely necessary to accompany and guide students towards new jobs, in view of employment prospects that are opening up in emerging and strategic sectors for the country: the green economy and biotechnologies; the relaunch of Made in Italy and the circular economy; the manufacturing tradition in industry 4.0 and the common assets of cultural and environmental heritage.

Perhaps it is not possible to think of the ecological transition if we do not place this phase within the change we are experiencing: this change is rethought, within Learning to Become, as the great opportunity for a new planetary humanism that our school system can deliver, in terms of education and schooling, to the 21st Century generations.

Knowledge, school design, skills; responsibility and awareness, educational community, organizational model; territories, people, businesses: Learning to Become is all this too, and we are building it together with schools.

The Indire research group

  • Elisabetta Mughini, Research Director
  • Carlo Mariani, Coordinator of the programme
  • Letizia Cinganotto, Researcher
  • Elena Mosa, Senior researcher
  • Lorenza Orlandini, Researcher
  • Silvia Panzavolta, First researcher
  • Antonio Guida, Ambassador of Avanguardie Educative
  • Francesca Pestellini, Technical collaborator