Pier Giuseppe Rossi

In today’s world, technology and digital media are no longer separate, “other” than “natural” human and social life. Technology has become pervasive, transparent, reaching a “stable” form, no longer revolutionary. A new concept, “the post-digital,” is emerging and gradually taking hold in a wide range of fields. The resulting complexities call for overcoming the binary and hierarchical approach between theory and practice by rethinking traditional teaching patterns and remediating knowledge. Maker Education is moving in this direction. It is considered a technology-based extension of activism, developing STEAM and 21st-century skills. Its main exponents believe that it can “disrupt” or transform traditional educational methods. The Maker Movement, indeed, overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. This contribution presents an ongoing research project that aims to outline a proposal for integrating this approach into the primary and lower secondary school curriculum. We detected its impact on students’ school self-efficacy and attitude toward STEM and 21st-century skills. The results collected in the first part of the project look promising. The data underline the pupils’ interest in STEM subjects and the improvement of their organizational and interpersonal skills.

The contribution describes a study on the organizational devices and the professional development programs carried out at the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) of the University of Siena and at the Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) of the University of Macerata. The focus is on systemic actions capable to elicit innovation at an organizational level, starting from the work of the institutional centers for research, professional training, and digital enhanced learning embedded in the university. In the final paragraph, future developmental trajectories for constituting an inter-universities network of TLCs are discussed.