CO-CREATING TEACHING AND LEARNING: AN “EMOTIONAL SUSTAINABLE” TEACHING INNOVATION

Recently in Higher Education institutions, the need has emerged to promote a kind of learning that connects the sharing of knowledge with the development of professional and soft skills [4]. Active learning responds to this need and allows increasing the students’ autonomy and awareness about their own learning path [3] [10]. Active learning structurally provides the activation of the students, thus shifting the focus on the students' actions and increasing students' engagement and motivation, and concurrently assigns to the teacher a role of facilitator [9] [11] [12] [13]. Active learning effectiveness, however, cannot be taken for granted because some attitudes can negatively affect it such as the resistance to change. Resistance to change can obviously emerge from the teacher because active learning implies that the teachers change their pedagogical framework and, sometimes, their vision of their professional role [17] [18]. Nevertheless, many scholars have highlighted how it often emerges from the students. Indeed, the students are often accustomed to a certain way of conducting lessons and consequently, they can feel a sense of disorientation in adhering to a learning approach that places them into a new paradigm, someway ‘at the center of the stage’ [12] [19] [20] [21]. It is clear that this significantly increases the emotional stress of the subjects involved in active learning, sometimes also placing an important obstacle to the implementation of educational innovation paths. How can this ambivalence be addressed? An approach that appears consistent with this situation is Co-creating learning and teaching. This expression refers to a wide range of learning and teaching activities that involve “a meaningful collaboration between students and staff, with students becoming more active participants in the learning process, constructing understanding and resources with academic staff” [32, p. 197]. The models connected with this approach provide that the different phases of didactic planning (learning objectives, activities, evaluation, etc.) are jointly negotiated by the students and the teachers, enhancing a shared responsibility that implies a greater students’ level of action and empowerment that are consequently more deeply ‘felt’ by them [31]. The paper will illustrate how this ‘strong’ involvement of the students makes it possible to introduce active learning paths capable to contrast the resistance to change and the emotional stress connected to it, since it allows obtaining students’ greater compliance by virtue of the prior sharing of the constituent elements of the course.