Didactic experimentation and teacher autonomy: needs and perceptions of future specialized teachers.

In recent years, in particular after the publication of the National Digital School Plan (PNSD, 2015) and the recent experience of the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic (Miur, 2020), the school has experimented with teaching methods that make students more protagonists of their learning path. The invitation to construct interdisciplinary paths, to overturn the structure of the lesson, from a moment of simple transmission of contents to an agora of comparison, of shared re-elaboration and collective construction of knowledge, asked teachers to orient themselves towards methodologies, suitable for new hybrid, complex and technology-mediated contexts: short teaching, cooperative learning, Flipped Classroom, Debate, Trialogic learning, 4P (Ministry of Education, 2021). These methodologies - based on the active and participatory construction of knowledge by students - make it possible to present teaching proposals aimed at acquiring skills (Di Donato, 2021a; 2021b). The most innovative methodologies are those which have integrated the students' need for challenge and feedback, with distributed leadership and a collaborative use of digital technologies. These characteristics have made it possible to develop teaching and learning strategies that are attentive to differences, no longer seen as a limit but as a resource, and have promoted processes of inclusion at school. In the new teaching models, the rethinking of the learning environment has taken on an important role, which has radically questioned a transmissive format of knowledge in favor of teaching based on skills (Council of the European Union, 2018) and prompted urgent reflection on the role of technologies and on educational innovation processes (Calvani, 2014; Castoldi, 2020; PNSD, 2015), also entrusting teachers with greater autonomy in developing personalized proposals and experimenting new models of classroom work (De Giuseppe & Corona, 2017). The skills of the teacher considered inclusive are in fact focused not only on psycho-pedagogical skills and on students' knowledge and their learning characteristics, but also on the ability to use innovative teaching methodologies in a creative and personal key (Bocci et al., 2021; Ianes, 2015). The contribution presents part of the results of a research that involved teachers enrolled in an Active Training Internship (TFA) to obtain the qualification of specialized teachers on support. Specifically, the teachers were involved at the end of a 75-hour indirect internship course dedicated to ICT for special teaching. The participants in the course were a total of 176 teachers, 163 of which were women and 13 were men; with the exception of 2%, all teachers were already in service and this allowed us to investigate how the perception of some aspects of the working environment influences the implementation of inclusive teaching practices. The survey involved the use of two tools: a structured questionnaire aimed at investigating the relationship between aspects of well-being / discomfort and training in the use of digital educational technologies and a self-interview. The latter was administered through the educational video-discussion platform Flipgrid (Stoszkowski, 2018; https://info.flip.com/), a collaborative digital work tool. The program allows the participant to self-register while answering the questions that the researcher has prepared and which he can read independently in the initial phase of the interview. The program also includes an automatic transcription system and returns an integral textual corpus for each interview. The self-interview consists of nine structured questions, which allow for open answers on the respondents' opinions and perceptions regarding: elements for work gratification; individual and contextual stressors and their impacts on practice; central elements for promoting autonomy in teaching; strategies adopted to implement inclusion; limits and resources in one's professionalism; support of colleagues as a reference point for good practices. 139 teachers responded to the self-interview, thus about 79% of the total number of participants. This contribution focuses on the results of self-interviews in relation to the themes of teaching autonomy and didactic experimentation, with a view to promoting inclusive teaching strategies. After having collected and edited the transcripts, work on the textual corpus continued through a thematic qualitative analysis (Pagani, 2020; Braun & Clark, 2006). We then proceeded with the coding process and the identification of the main and secondary themes, which were accompanied by descriptions and pertinent extracts, up to the analysis work which involved both the interpretation of what emerged and a count of occurrences for each subcategory. The results showed that the elements perceived as fundamental by teachers to implement an effective didactic experimentation primarily concern the relationship with colleagues and continuous training together with the presence of suitable environments for such experimentation (affordance). The cooperation and support of colleagues are essential for the realization of a shared educational mission (Di Donato & De Santis, 2021c, 2021d). In fact, future specialized teachers perceive the limit of not being able to be effective individually, but only in agreement with the entire school organization (Canevaro & Ianes, 2021). The contribution presented intends to reflect on the theme of collaboration and sharing of all those involved in the process of inclusion at school as a key to real cultural, methodological and didactic change.