L’uso del Design Based Research per lo sviluppo di modelli didattici innovativi nelle scuole piccole e rurali. Il caso di “Classi in rete"

Small schools, widespread in rural and remote areas of the world, present specific characteristics and challenges compared to urban schools. Educational research has devoted increasing attention to these realities, seeking to understand their characteristics, problems and potential, but also to design and evaluate interventions capable of improving the quality of education, including through the use of technology, and to promote local development. Among the methodological approaches used in this field, Design-Based Research, responding to the criticism of the experimental method in education, makes it possible to: integrate research and the design of educational solutions, in order to test solutions (called “interventions”) to educational problems; generate theories that can explain and improve teaching and learning processes; generate innovation and change of the people and systems involved. In this paper, the application of DBR in the context of small Italian schools will be presented. In particular, the design, through the Conjecture Mapping technique, of the “Classi in rete” model, developed to address the problem of the social and cultural isolation of remote classes, will be described. An analysis of the results obtained from its first implementation in schools in the inland areas of Abruzzo will then be proposed and, finally, the indications for changing the model for the design of the second implementation cycle will be presented.