Abstract:

Recently in Higher Education institutions is emerged the need to promote learning that connects the sharing of knowledge with the development of professional and soft skills (White et al, 2016). Active learning responds to this need and it also allows to increase students’ autonomy and awareness about their own learning path (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, Syson, Litchfield, & Lawrence, 2009).

Active learning structurally provides activation of the students shifting the focus on the students' actions and increasing students' engagement and motivation and it assigns to the teacher a role of facilitator (Baxter & Gray, 2001; Prince, 2004; Michael, 2006; Daouk, Bahous, & Bacha, 2016). Active learning effectiveness, however, cannot be taken for granted because some can negatively impact it such as resistance to change. Resistance to change can obviously emerge from the teacher because active learning implies that teachers change their pedagogical framework and, sometimes their vision of their vision professional role (Kimonen & Nevalainen, 2005, Townsend & Bates, 2007) but many scholars have highlighted how it often emerges from students. Indeed, they are often accustomed to a certain way of conducting lessons and consequently, they can feel a sense of disorientation in adhering to a learning approach that places them into a new paradigm and places them someway ‘at the center of the stage’ (Springer, Stanne, & Donnovam 1999; Prince, 2004; Armbruster et al., 2009, Owens et al., 2020).

It is clear that this significantly increases the emotional stress of the subjects involved in active learning (Schmidt, 2008), sometimes also posing as an important obstacle to the implementation of educational innovation paths. How can this ambivalence be addressed?

An approach that appears consistent with this situation is Co-creating learning and teaching. This expression refers to a wide range of learning and teaching activities that involve “a meaningful collaboration between students and staff, with students becoming more active participants in the learning process, constructing understanding and resources with academic staff” (Bovill et al., 2016, p. 197). The models connected with this approach provide that the different phases of didactic planning (learning objectives, activities, evaluation, etc.) are negotiated jointly between students and teachers, enhancing a shared responsibility that implies a greater level of action and empowerment of students more deeply ‘felt’ (Bovill, 2020).

The paper will illustrate how this ‘strong’ involvement of students makes possible to introduce active learning paths capable of contrasting the resistance to change and the emotional stress connected to it since it allows to obtain students’ greater compliance by virtue of the prior sharing of the constituent elements of the course.

Keywords:

Co-creating teaching and learning, Active learning, Resistance to change, Emotional stress, Teaching innovation.