Abstract:

Background:
Over the last few months we have been protagonists of an epochal revolution. Covid19 has put to the test, in formal educational contexts of all levels, one of the fundamental dimensions of learning, especially in the humanities: participation. In this regard, nowadays more than ever, the distributed and situated nature of the learning processes requires to focus on an educational work concerning the processes of sharing, socialization and negotiation that minds carry out together while learning, and that promotes community building of learning.

Aim of the work:
This contribution aims to describe, through the narration of an educational experience prepared ad hoc, the effort of preserving, during the second semester of the last academic year 2019/2020, the fundamental participatory dimension in cooperative learning, despite and also thanks to the teaching distance.

Methods:
University students of the three-year degree course in psychological sciences and techniques of the University of Naples "Federico II", during the lessons of pedagogy of the learning processes, lessons held remotely via Microsoft Team platform, were able to experience the work in a small group at a distance, experiencing in first person the methodology of cooperative learning and the intersubjectively co-constructed nature of knowledge through educational situation prepared in this sense, situation whose process and product are described in particular.

Results:
Thanks to the students' reflections about cooperative distance learning experience, reflections obtained through a focus group carried out at the end of the intervention, the emergency produced by the Covid-19 epidemic, initially experienced as an insuperable obstacle to the realization of any educational project, was reread, in the light of the experience realized and described, as a possible opportunity to start new reflections, to verify in the field the effectiveness of collaborative paths, social consolidation and activation of participatory discussion, and to experience the great usefulness of new forms and new communication tools, critically evaluating their pros and cons.

Conclusions:
The arrangement of the real and/or virtual 'meeting places' is crucial for the possibility of becoming aware of the importance, in learning processes, of the exchange between the personal wealth of knowledge that each person possesses as their own formative background, new acquisitions to learn and the cultural significance of each member of the community, which is always singular, peculiar and specific. Even from a distance.

Keywords:

cooperative learning; distance teaching; contextualism; digital competence; participation.