University Teaching: Laboratories during the Covid-19 Emergency

This paper offers a first-hand account of university teaching during the recent public health emergency, with a specific focus on laboratories. In late-February 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, which was particularly severe in the Lombardy region, led the government and national health authorities to suspend all on-site teaching-learning activities in schools and universities. Here, I take a preliminary look at how these measures were applied to the General Didactics module of the Degree Course in Primary Education offered by the University of Milano-Bicocca. While the abrupt switch from classroom to distance learning methods represented a radical change and prompted the complete redesign of course structure, content and materials, laboratories were particularly strongly affected. Laboratories - together with teaching practice - are a core component of the degree course in primary education, which delivers basic training to future infant and primary school teachers: they are key because they provide student teachers with opportunities to connect theory and practice. Students are divided into groups of 30 max. for three four-hour sessions on different course themes and are invited to reflect on the real-life implications of their course work for children at school. The moderators are teachers, who conduct a series of activities that have been agreed in advance with the group; they continuously invite the student teachers to relate the contents of the workshop to the practices they themselves implemented during their internships in schools. As with all laboratories, being physically present and in physical contact with others, while conducting group activities and then collectively reflecting on them have traditionally been key to transforming theoretical hypotheses into shared meta-reflections. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, the laboratory component of the module was converted into a cycle of online sessions with the laboratory moderators, who received ad hoc training in the use of new technologies. Drawing on feedback provided by the moderators on this series of online laboratories, I explore the challenges and successes experienced and discuss the extent to which the new format will inspire permanent changes in university teaching beyond the present public health crisis.