An Inspiration for Innovative Educators

by Cinzia Largher

Teaching means enabling young people to fully realize their potential dreams, guiding them on a journey that makes them independent, and equipping them with the necessary skills to be active citizens. Today’s society requires competent individuals who can tackle the current world’s problems, confront technological, environmental, and social challenges. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to acquire these requirements. Moreover, we live in a society where the paradigms of reference have changed and the economic and social balance it relied on no longer holds and as imbalances accumulated over time threaten its survival. We must rely on science and the commitment of the youth to create a society founded on respect for humanity and the environment. The community can mobilize resources when needed, as seen in the search for the Covid vaccine. We live in an interdependent world that must collaborate over the long term to create a society aimed at improving human life and safeguarding the environment. For this reason, we must create a more democratic society that ensures education for all, social equity, and sustainable development.

What Education for Sustainable Development?

Education is crucial to change and achieve a more democratic and sustainable society, and schooling is undoubtedly the main tool for transforming society economically and socially. The teacher plays a crucial role, needing a vision for a certain type of school, being aware of the value of each person, their potential, and uniqueness. A good teacher should leave a mark on their students’ lives, help them realize their potential and abilities, and provide suitable tools and methods for acquiring cognitive, social, and personal skills. Students should be guided to recognize their talents, strengths, and think about their future in terms of goals to achieve. This should occur in an atmosphere of freedom, where there is an exchange of ideas and respect for others’ opinions, decisions are made democratically, and judgment and impositions are absent. It’s a model aligned with democratic schooling, focusing on the learning individual, on social construction of knowledge, and in the awareness of everyone’s diversity. We refer to the pedagogy of Don Milani, Paulo Freire, Loris Malaguzzi, educators whose main goals were to liberate individuals from social conditioning hindering learning. In this sense, education becomes an act of justice, of liberation from inequality, an opportunity for participation and training for the excluded, for those who live outside the dominant culture.

Times have changed, and Italian society has been modernized, after 1960 education became widespread and compulsory schooling was extended up to middle school. Education has made a difference, offering hope to all, people from lower social classes improved their economic and cultural situation. Even children of workers could become professors, doctors, and engineers. However, at a certain point, starting from the mid-1990s, economic development began to slow down, and the resources allocated to education have been limited. Not everyone has been able to benefit from adequate education and education has no longer been a tool that would ensure social mobility. In 2022, 10.4 percent of the Italian school population, according to data from the National Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational System of Education and Training (Invalsi, 2023), will graduate with only a high school diploma or less.

These are technically called drop out, but are people with feeling, hopes and rights, who areinable to meet academic demands. Leaving school without higher school diplomas or professional skills means to enter a job market unprepared, without the adequate skills to compete and with the risk of entering a cycle of precarious, underpaid and without future jobs. A democratic society can’t afford to lose these young people. We must rethink education in order to build an inclusive learning environment, and provide appropriate tools so that everyone can learn to develop their own abilities regardless of their cultural background.

The learning environment

The fundamental concepts on which an inclusive learning environment should be based are as follows: a) Learning should be meaningful, linked to learners’ knowledge and interests; b) Students should be at the center of educational action, feeling safe, competent, and feel seen by the teacher; c) the teacher must have a role as a guide, be a facilitator of learning, a mentor, and an innovator. A person who has the ability and flexibility to adapt teaching to the new reality, always integrating new tools.

Based on these considerations, I illustrate the main points from my research (2017) at the primary schools “De Ontplooiing” in Amsterdam and Het Palet in Almere, a town east of Amsterdam with a high immigrant population. These schools are part of O4NT, a non-profit organization aiming to establish a new era of learning-centered schools, emphasizing learning to learn and 21st-century skills .

The methodology used is Montessori, which is highly valued in the Netherlands, according to which the child must learn in an atmosphere of freedom and trust considering the desire to learn as an intrinsic need to master reality (Montessori, 1917). To this end, efforts were made to create an environment in support of personalized learning, where everything was functional to empower the student to be autonomous and responsible for his/her learning.

The central moment of the process is coaching, a phase of metacognition and project where the student reflects on current knowledge and, together with the teacher and parent, plans what he/her will learn in the next six weeks. A personal development plan is established, which the student must adhere to by attending the workshops outlined in the plan and complete individual work in mathematics and language, using adaptive software.

Technology integrates into daily life, becoming common tools alongside Montessori’s methods, creating an extended learning environment where learning is possible anywhere. The school’s organization is inspired by the principles of the Jena Plan schools (Petersen, 1927) which foresee that independent learning is possible through doing, cooperation, communal living, and shared responsibilities among students and parents. Emphasis is on creating the necessary space to allow students to understand, express themselves, feel accepted, collaborate, exchange, and be creative. In curricular workshops, students work in groups formed according to the level they have achieved in the subject; in core groups, students who also belong to different ages work on specific topics; in optional workshops, students choose which activity to participate in (Petersen,1927).

It all starts from inspiration

The model introduces presents a new school organization with the goal of creating personalized learning based on the ideas of pedagogists and educators who viewed teaching as a process of forming democratic citizens. The teacher must be innovative and able to implement teaching in which he or she engages students accustomed to interacting in immersive, technologically advanced environments.
The student interacts in an immersive environment, learning through experience (Dewey, 1938) building knowledge through exploration, collaboration, and exchange.

It’s just a model, an idea from which to draw inspiration to revise teaching and school organization, certainly it has to be refined, but everything starts with an inspiration.
Our responsibility is to innovate education so that we can prepare young people to innovate a world that belongs to all (Arendt, 1961) .

Sources:

1 European Commission (2008). Improving skills for the 21st century: an agenda for European cooperation in education, Bruxelles. Retrieved from: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/IT/TXT/PDF/uri=CELEX:52008DC0425&from=NL#:~:text=21%C2%B0%20secolo%20occorre%20adottare,solidariet%C3%A0%2C%20coesione%20sociale%20e%20sostenibilit%C3%A0
2 Montessori (1938), (1992 edizione). Come educare il potenziale umano. Garzanti (Milano)
3 Petersen, P. (1927). Der Kleine Jena-Plan. Beltz Reihe Pedagogie: Basel
4 Arendt, H. (1961). Tra passato e futuro. Garzanti: Milano.
5 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg6UoylhEmw
6 The Netherlands’ ‘Steve Jobs Schools’ – Education for a New Era (Learning World S4E42,