Abstract:

One of the UNESCO sustainable development goals (UNESCO, 2017) is a quality education for all and nowadays quality education has to extend to Computing (Nardelli, 2019). A strong thrust to introduce Informatics from primary schools has come from enacted initiatives (Falkner, 2019a), (Falkner, 2019b) all over the word. In Europe this effort has been depicted in (Carpsen, 2018) and in Italy a concrete proposal has been proposed in (CINI, 2018) after a long debate (Callegarin, 2001). On the enacted side of the story, effort in this direction has been pioneered by initiatives like the MOOC Coding in your classroom, Now! (Bogliolo, 2016) around which a vibrant Community of Practice (CoP) of more than 35,000 (mainly primary and early secondary school) educators has grown. For high school and undergraduate studies for students not majoring in Computer Science, a curriculum like the “CompuCogito ergo sum” has been presented, after an extensive practice (Giordano, 2014) in (Maiorana, 2019) and can be used for pre-service (Maiorana, 2019) and teacher professional development (Maiorana, 2017). Among the Initiatives covering both the formal, informal and non-formal side of the story, movements like code.org, (Franke, 2015), CSForAll (Santo, 2018), Informatics For All (Caspersen, 2018), “Programma il futuro” (Nardelli, 2019), just to cite a few, have demonstrated that changes all over the world are feasible. To sustain this effort for an inclusive and accessible quality education, teachers and educators are central to this process representing the head, the heart and the bridge between learners and the society. Quality teaching requires a rich set of competencies as described in competencies frameworks developed for educators, (Bocconi, 2016), (Caena, 2019), (UNESCO, 2018), (Griffin, 2014) just to cite a few. Teachers can succeed in all of this since they are sustained by enduring passion to teach and by a community of practices like the Scientix network where teachers all over Europe sustain each other, sharing best practices and experience in the teaching and research aspects of their profession.

The Scientix ambassadors, after reviewing Competencies Frameworks for educators, research and experience reports on international communities of practices like (Morelli, 2014), will present the Scientix project and his activities (Baldursson, 2015), (Billon, 2019). From the direct voice of Scientix ambassador teachers, the paper offers a variegated set of “on the field” educators activities. The experience reports range from primary to high school up to undergraduate and professional development courses for special ability educators, covering and demonstrating, according to the Technology Pedagogical Content model (DeRossi, 2018a) model (DeRossi, 2018b) an impressive richness in interdisciplinary content, pedagogical approaches, technologies and tools used. This richness can flourish only inside a community of practices of devoted and motivated educators representing the only viable means for an equitable and inclusive education.

Keywords:

Quality education for all, Digital technologies, inclusive pedagogies, TPCK.