Learning while teaching during a collective crisis: post-pandemic possibilities for social work education in Italy

Focusing on the field of social work education in Italy, this chapter analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways of coping with it. Previous structural issues, combined with the abrupt disruption of taken-for-granted assumptions and routines caused by the crisis, exposed teachers and students to unprecedented challenges. Efforts to cope with the new circumstances also created conditions for live experiments to be undertaken, unveiling the potential for resilience and innovations. This chapter describes creative educational projects carried out around the country during the pandemic and closely examines one course, social work in contexts of emergency, in which a critical pedagogy approach was used to combine critical thinking, dialogic learning, and reciprocal care to allow a process of cooperative learning.