Towards Innovative and Creative Use of Participatory Platforms. Research Experiences Promoted by Fondazione Reggio Children.

ABSTRACT: The importance of taking clear steps in designing online learning, rethinking the roles of teachers and students in digital interactive experiences and the limitations and possibilities of online learning, have been recently debated in the scientific context (Verawardina et al., 2020), also given the sudden changes imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This contribution aims to describe recent research experiences developed by the research project Scintillae, jointly promoted by the Fondazione Reggio Children-Centro Loris Malaguzzi and The LEGO Foundation, and to discuss possible ways to design online workshops based on co-construction and children and adult's engagement in hybridized practices. The experiences described were intended to create and offer contexts where the creative potentials of play and digital tools generate ideas, connections, meaningful aesthetic experiences and new knowledge. In particular, the digital dimension was intended as a new interpretative context of the Hundred languages theory (Malaguzzi,1987). Learning contexts were designed by referring to an idea of technology diffused and integrated, involving adults and children in the active investigation and «movement» between digital, analogue tools and expressive languages, exploring new digital alphabets. During the online workshops designed and proposed by the research team, the active role of the young students and adults in the co-creation of learning processes through technologies was emphasized. The use of participatory and collaborative platforms was aimed at sustaining children and adults' creative strategies, by interpreting participatory online platforms as spaces where a collective design process could take place.