At-distance learning during emergency: impact of the covid-19 pandemic on hard-to-reach students.

Distance learning (DL) during the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted critical issues and problems in maintaining continuity in teaching and ensuring the active involvement of all students. The experienced difficulties make necessary to rethink educational planning in the more complex learning ecologies, characterised by digital contexts. Moreover, the educational conditions of vulnerable students become more evident in the DL, placing this segment of population more at risk of disengagement and drop out. Starting from these assumptions, this work explores the teachers' point of view with respect to the difficulties encountered in their distance teaching experience in reaching the most vulnerable pupils. The survey is aimed at better understanding who, according to the teacher’s perspective, are the most difficult students to reach, which are the major obstacles encountered and which the educational methodologies used. The article proposes a critical reflection in order to draw possible perspectives that can guide the teachers to achieve, also through the DL, the inclusion and participation of all students.