“Digital learning to (re)imagine a positive direction for post-COVID education”: european perspectives

Financiamento europeu Erasmus + ref. 2020-1-UK01-KA226-SCH-094495During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid shift to homeschooling and remote learning required educators to adapt to new ways of teaching, new technologies and new methods of communication. Thus, and because multiple challenges continue to be posed to education, namely in view of the expansion of digital resources, the RAPIDE project, an Erasmus+ project, funded by the European Union, has been in place aiming at: (i) an increase in educators’ ability and confidence to provide effective and inclusive digital learning opportunities; (ii) an increase in educators’ ability to manage change in their working practices; (iii) an increase in the ability of the wider community including parents, carers, other family members and other interested professionals to understand and support both educators and students in digital learning contexts. One of the ways of addressing those challenges is by Reimagining a Positive Direction for Education (RAPIDE), namely through teacher training, which we have provided within the activities of the aforementioned project. Therefore, it is our goal to present the short-term teacher training action that occurred during the learning event hosted in Lisbon, in January 2023, by the Universidade Aberta (Open University Portugal), in collaboration with the leading and other partner institutions of the RAPIDE project, and a School Association Training Center from the municipality of Loures, in the district of Lisbon. To this end, we will start by a brief theoretical framework of the training, mainly inspired by the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators: DigCompEdu (Redecker & Punie, 2017), and the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) (European Union, 2020). These milestones also inspire the RAPIDE project, and its characterization is also foreseen. Adding to those two references, and due to its impact on the work of the Portuguese School Association Training Centers, we will also consider the Action Plan for the Digital Transition (Portuguese Republic, 2020), an initiative of the Portuguese government and a national project that has been guiding the school practices in Portugal, from 2020 onwards. Then, we will focus on European teachers’ narratives and perspectives on digital learning, collected from interviews done within the RAPIDE project, ultimately to anticipate paths for current and future post-covid education. To conclude, we hope that our short-term teacher training action will motivate other teachers and educators worldwide to continue to feed the reflection on digital learning, based on the narratives and perspectives previously mentioned, and to stimulate the exchange of testimonies and sharing of experiences on post-COVID digital learning, so as to foster a broader discussion on digital learning. In other words, we believe our short-term teacher training action can contribute to favor the reflection and the debate on digital learning in order to (re)discover answers and resources for an education that is adequate for the challenges of the 21st century.