The Role of Journalism in an Experiential Learning Session in Primary School

This work aims to analyse the activities of ‘distance’ design and editing held in April-May 2020 by the teachers and pupils of the ‘Villaggio Olimpico’ primary school in Rome to realize La Gazzetta Olimpica. The project, now in its fourth year, aims at introducing the children to decode the basic concepts of journalism and, in the same time, at involving them in a journalism workshop, drafting of a newspaper based on their personal experiences, life at school and in the ‘Villaggio Olimpico’ neighbourhood. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop needed to adapt this ‘experiential learning’ activity to the distance learning methods. As an unexpected and interesting result, this has made the final product a way to observe the months of lockdown from the pupils’ direct point of view. The research involves two phases, linked to the participant observation of the journalism workshop and to the analysis of the children’s final products in a comparative perspective with the previous issues, in order to identify similarities and differences between what has been produced in the traditional teaching mode and in the distance learning mode.