An online community of relationship-centred university educational innovation

Areas:
SH - Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract:
The project aims to create a peer training community for faculty development, dedicated to innovative relationship-centred teaching. The specific objectives are: (1) to carry out a national mapping of university didactics centred on relationality; (2) to theoretically define the new categories emerging from the surveyed practices; (3) starting from the identified realities, to network an open peer education community (digital, free and public) where the sharing of practices fuels further research initiatives and innovative action. The relevance of the proposal is dictated by the current didactic shortcomings of university teaching. The COVID emergency has highlighted the fragility of universities; in fact, it has shown that the reflection on didactic innovation in Italian universities focuses on training in the use of technological tools and neglects deeper pedagogical foundations. This approach has proved to be very limited, since, on average, university teachers adopt a didactic approach based on the transmission of content (or technical-scientific training) that is inadequate and ignore the training of students' soft skills. The consequences are: (1) the education of university students is disconnected from the demands of soft skills required by the social and economic environments and (2) the university is unprepared to integrate the growing number of freshmen with educational debts. This generates the urgent need for a more conscious pedagogy that improves the university's ability to compensate for the shortcomings derived from high school and to adapt to the socio-economic community of which it is a part. A single project cannot aim to solve the educational deficiencies that university students are accumulating, but it can trigger a paradigm shift to address them more successfully than has been the case so far. The project responds to the aforementioned shortcomings with originality because: (1) it adopts an interdisciplinary didactic, pedagogical and anthropological approach that challenges the current theoretical categories that are proving insufficient; (2) it enhances the university teacher as a pedagogically active figure of facilitator of the learning process in a shared mode, and not only as a
provider of knowledge as is the case now; (3) differently from the current academic paradigm, it pays specific attention to the relationships between teachers and students, understood as the student's human training for conscious social living; (4) it avoids the traditional top-down approach of Italian faculty development in favour of a peer-to-peer and bottom-up approach that is more motivating and lasting for those involved; (5) it puts relationships at the forefront of teaching innovation, compensating for the almost exclusive centrality given to means and tools; hence it questions the improper exclusive equation between educational innovation and the use of technology.

Duration of the project:
15/10/2023 – 15/10/2025

Co-Principal Investigator:
Roberta Bonetti

Principal investigator:
Elena Landone (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Partnership:
Univeristà degli studi di Milano Humanitas University

Budget of the University of Bologna:
67.590

EUR ERC sectors:
SH3_11 Social aspects of teaching and learning, curriculum studies, education and educational policies
SH3_5 Attitudes and beliefs