Abstract:

In this contribution we report about the UniPD Virtual School project, which was developed in the context of a joint seed funding between the University of Padua in Italy and Monash University in Australia. The project involved pre-service and early-career physics teachers in the design and implementation of online lessons for secondary school students, in particular those struggling in the discipline. The twofold goal was to enhance the range of training options for future teachers while also reducing educational disadvantage among students.

The project originated from the Monash Virtual School experience, which started in 2020 with the pandemic and evolved in the following years. In the UniPD version, the project was reformulated taking into consideration the characteristics of the Italian school system. Italian regulations to teach in secondary school are currently under revision, at the moment requiring future teachers to gain 24 credits in teaching methodology/pedagogy/didactics. They are not required to engage in internships at school, which limits the possibility for them to gain experience in the field before they enter the profession. Through this project we tried to fill this gap by offering pre-service and early-career teachers an opportunity for training and reflective practice.

Participants (N=8) were involved in a digital community of practice, which allowed them to network and share pedagogical and content expertise while performing Virtual School activities. Staff from UniPd, Monash and local schools collaborated in order to guide teachers in their participation in the community and in their activities with the students. Two secondary schools were involved: a Liceo Scientifico (university-oriented high school with a science major) and a technical school. Two in-service teachers from these schools were involved as tutors, each one following a group of 4 participants.

In its Italian pilot version in 2022, the Virtual School took the form of a summer course, mainly (but not exclusively) aimed at students that had experienced difficulties in the discipline during the school year. The course was designed for 9th grade students, for whom the start of high school had been particularly difficult after two years of pandemic, and it featured 8 online lessons, each one lasting 1 hour. After a common planning phase, each lesson was co-taught by two of the participants.

The participants were involved in pre/post semi-structured online interviews designed to explore their perceptions of the different roles and competencies of online physics teachers, which were analyzed in terms of epistemic frames theory. Data from the students, aimed at investigating their perceptions about the course and how it contributed to their learning, were collected through an online questionnaire.

In this paper we will describe the implementation of the Virtual School project in Italy, highlighting the similarities and differences with the Australian version. We will then focus on one of the Italian subgroups (N=4), describing their Virtual School experience and how their views about online physics teachers evolved through it.

The results will help us understand how the Virtual School concept can be implemented in different contexts and in which ways the Virtual School experience can impact on teachers’ epistemic frames, allowing for a better integration of this experience in initial teacher education.

Keywords:

Teacher training, distance education, STEM education.