EUROPEAN BUREAU OF AEDE
VIDEO CONFERENCE
about
The online school in Europe:
Just an emergency response
or even the beginning of a new phase for school?
11th May 2020
MOTION
The AEDE European Bureau, meeting by videoconference on Monday 11 May 2020, addressing the topic “The online school in Europe: just responding to the emergency or even starting a new phase for school?”
So verbalizes:
• Considering that, since the end of February we have come out of normal and we found ourselves suddenly in an emergency health situation with the lockdown of schools and the blocking of face-to-face activity ;
• Taking into account that teachers and pupils found themselves engaged only in distance learning, which had not been experimented and organized before and which does not have a reference regulation;
• Taken note with satisfaction that, suddenly facing this new reality, teachers dedicated themselves carefully and generously to reconvert and re-think the teaching activity;
• Given the brilliant results of this certainly tiring and demanding work, that is leading the school towards the end of the school year;
• While not ignoring the limits of an exclusively distance learning method, unable to restore the fullness of an educational and pedagogical action, rich in the human warmth of presence and aggregation;
• Aware that the presence school absolutely remains fundamental, as an educating community that cannot be replaced by technology;
EXPRESSES
a warm approval towards the teachers and all the school operators, who have carefully and generously reconverted the normal teaching activity into online activities, revealing great professionalism and a sense of responsibility in making the technological tools their own, by which to continue along the learning-teaching process. Their role has been and is very important and decisive.
MANIFESTS
Its belief that, when we get out of this situation, school will never be the same again. We are only at the beginning of one of the greatest educational revolutions in history. The school of the future, in fact, will not be like before.
A revolution has been launched, in which the pivot of the learning process is no longer represented by the teacher who teaches, but by the student who learns.
Teaching has gained a flexibility that is not akin to the traditional frontal lesson, to rigid programs and codified evaluation standards.
School, for the future, must have the courage to bring into the distance teaching what can be brought into such teaching, it must be able to create a new space and a new time in which students will not only be passive listeners, but active protagonists, using digital virtual spaces and collective learning workshops.
Distance learning will require a complete redesign of the teaching-learning process.
Undoubtedly, distance learning will not and should not represent a substitute solution for school activities but will be able to support face-to-face teaching, in order to facilitate insights and research on specific issues.
URGES
the Institutions and all the social operators to the highest effort to ensure a topical and alive teaching, of great quality , responding to the needs of the time.
CONFIRMS
The importance of teachers’ role , even if other than the traditional one, to be in line with the needs of a changing school, more and more featured by the presence of new technologies. Today, in the face of multimedia technologies, they no longer have the comfort of an absolute truth, by virtue of which to warrant their role, but they must replace this form of disappeared legitimacy with other forms, such as professionalism, the ability to teaching, the competence coming from a higher knowledge, the ability to always be ready for change, to propose innovation and to act as an agent of social transformation.