I have recently published an illustrated book for young children and worked at the development of online and offline art laboratories .
Working on these projects this year – considering what has been and is still happening – has definitely expanded my academic experience as well as deepened the understanding of schools and new parents.

As evident from these months of lockdown, education is a topic that effects the daily routine of anyone around the globe.
While schools have remained closed due to the virus, parents panicked because of the sudden lack of infrastructures that could contain and entertain the new generation.
Most of the families, pupils and students have been ‘put on-hold’ due to the initial semester’s uncertainty, and most of the education institutes with reliable internet access have rushed to digitize their learning materials.

Accordingly, articles on well-known online magazines published lists of tools and recommendations that could optimize the remote learning experience for instructors and students, as well as for organizations supporting education in a race against time meant to improve digital literacy.

This digitization spree works, but it has its limitations. It seems that the ‘digital natives’ – this is how we (older) call the young generation – are not so much into screen-based learning, at least not in the way we were expecting.
The copycat of traditional systems into pixel doesn’t seem to look appealing to students who complain about the way the new classes have taken shape.

Collaborating with pupils, I collected their voices and feelings during this peculiar time: some of them were energized by seeing their friends on the screen, and yet they couldn’t bear with the one-hour-long lesson on their devices.

As adults, we should wake up and consider that in order to innovate education, we need to develop a series of alternative models.

The forced adoption of digital tools is not sufficient to deal with the changes occurring in our world. To guarantee innovation and keep up with what is happening now, we need cultural and talent-related diversity.
Can we guarantee diversity when educators share the same academic background? How can we assure innovation without trans-disciplinary exchanges?
The debate about the upcoming semester has started with discussions on new desks, masks or ‘artificial devices’- extensions of this unexpected reality. Yet, it is the content, or better how we spend time sharing experiences and knowledge with our pupils, that should be at the center of these public debates.

the philosopher Ivan Illich‘s in his book book ‘De-schooling society’ (1971) writes “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”

There is not a secret formula on how to initiate a better educational approach to life

Since early age, schools should aim at initiating and favoring the expression of our nature, emotion and background.
I believe that the human body is at the center of the learning process, and art is a tool to explore and reveal the self to ourselves and to others.
For example, the gesture of painting is not about reproducing the master, is about achieving an inner equilibrium.

the context where we all are living now pretty much resembles the ‘ moist media’ – as sum of bits, atoms, neutrons and genes – described by British artist and theorist Roy Ascott.

By being aware of it, we can help structuring the idea of our self and become active contributors to the society.