Abstract:

At a time when an ever-increasing number of pupils and students at all levels of schooling present a wide range of different and specific needs – both educational and formative, related not only to disabilities or learning disorders, but also to language difficulties due to recent migration experience or disadvantaged socio-cultural backgrounds or psychological fragilities – a change at the methodological-didactic level is required. Recent scientific findings highlight how the use of creative and innovative teaching methods, centered on the figure of the learner rather than the teacher, is one of the main keys to success capable of developing higher levels of involvement and collaboration among peers, thus reducing opportunities for competition and isolation that are decisive in exposing the most fragile individuals to the risk of failure or, even, early school dropout. In addition to this, creative and innovative teaching methods, by their very nature helping to ignite active participation and hands-on experience, provide a solid basis for developing the key competencies of the 21st century from an inclusive perspective.

In light of this, the European Erasmus+ project “Acadimia - European Teachers’ Academy for Creative and Inclusive Learning” intends to promote the dissemination and adoption of a number of innovative teaching methods by, on the one hand, taking care of the creation of documentation on these methods that is clear and accessible and, on the other hand, creating opportunities for training and sharing among teachers of all school levels. The ten selected methods, elaborated by the member partners, are divided on the basis of their specific characteristics into three groups – “Theatre and improvisation” (4), “Games and adaptable pathways” (2) and “Digital and innovative activities” (4) – and presented, first, in a concise and synthetic form within a synopsis and, later, in an extended and detailed manner, within a Joint Curriculum. This document, designed to accompany training courses aimed at teachers, contains all the information needed to apply the methods in their own school context, as well as specific resources related to them. With the aim of testing and evaluating it prior to its dissemination, it was preliminarily presented to a group of teachers of various nationalities and different school orders and grades. On that occasion, in addition to gathering feedback elaborated in small working groups focused on the specific areas of afferent creative methods, they were also asked to fill out an individual questionnaire aimed at gathering specific suggestions for improving its quality. The results collected, which are the subject of this research, signal a widespread appreciation of the quality and level of detail of the information contained in the Joint Curriculum with reference to each method, but they also point to the need for more practical material, consisting, for example, of demonstration videos, that can operationally show how to conduct certain work steps.

Keywords:

Innovative methods, inclusion, teacher professional development.