AN INTERNSHIP ANALYSIS: EXPERIENCE, EXPERIMENT, EXPERTISE IN THE ITALIAN SCHOOL SYSTEM

TEDD (Technologies for Education: Devices and Diversity) aims to be an innovative pilot project in Italy on teachers’ advanced formation in ICT competencies and their pedagogical approach.

Held by the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento, TEDD’s goal is to train a select and diverse group of graduated (representative in age, nationality and educational background) to examine the complex relationship between education and technology in modern society, focussing particularly on the school system.

The TEDD course is structured in two parts during an entire academic year: the first part involves 6 months of lessons in the classroom (30 hours/week), whilst the second part provides an internship in different working areas.

In a previous paper - TEDD experience: an innovative educational methodology explained by students - we analysed the first part of the course, focusing on the organization of lessons, teaching methodologies, approaches and subjects, in order to make students aware of the development of ICT skills in schools.

This paper aims to present and analyse collected data on participants' internships held in different fields of education during the second part of the course.

Firstly it will offer an overview of the various skills developed by students, focusing mainly on those which proved to be most useful and suitable for the internships, gathering information through interviews and questionnaires, which take into account the perspectives of both participants and tutors.

Starting with the point of view of participants on the results of the TEDD course, this part of the paper will focus on the data collected on internships held in schools in order to:
1) reflect on the effective results of TEDD in this field,
2) analyse which competencies developed during TEDD are required in nowadays Italian schools,
3) which skills are eventually still necessary to implement in teachers’ advanced formation, and
4) offer a general overview of the Italian school system as well as identifying its cultural, structural and technical limits.

The important role of “experience in the field” (referring to Dewey’s concept of learning by doing) in strengthening abilities, skills and competencies acquired in the classroom, will be discussed as one of the key observations in studying the link between learning in class and learning outside of it.