education as a social endeavour

While government's cutbacks to public education and culture are getting heavier and heavier, thus limiting the possibility that citizens achieve their ambitions, all the people involved in education are realizing that young-adults relationship in schools are degrading.

Because of various interests and attractions coming from the outside, the traditional classroom can’t meet students' actual needs any more. Teachers are definitely aware that something has to change if they want to catch kids’ and boys’ attention; they see the benefits of building web communities focused on active partecipation to cope with todays' challenges and they realize that the valuable support of the ICT can be effective only if they are carefully selected and mastered once the solutions to solve pedagogical problems have been sketched out.

Yet, overcoming all the troubles and conceptual difficulties that arise in practice is not an easy task for lonely educators. Here is the importance of the pioneering attempts, that can open the way to new views of the educational system, thanks to the exchange of practices and the analysis of scholars to develop exportable models.

In fact, recently, the Italian society has witnessed a growing number of scattered efforts to improve and make more inclusive the educational system, at a local level, that often remain unknown to most of the other schools.

Experimentations have come up from the grassroots: teachers, cultural associations and the whole society have joined schools to creatively work out new methods, exploiting the spreading of mobile communication devices and social networks. Contrary to the usual top-down relationship, in which institutional experts committees devise didactic experimentation plans to be proposed to well-intentioned teachers, the opposite is occurring here. People are eager to give response to those specific issues they are going through and they do the best they can. Only subsequently scholars are involved to refine the implemented strategies.