Online supervision as a supporting tool to define curricular internship programmes: a research on future Nursery School educators

Abstract

In rethinking the articulation of training activities following the COVID-19 pandemic, university contexts have had to face a complex challenge: the reorganization of internships within the course curriculum. Re-designing these experiences while taking into account public health and local needs has led to the sudden transformation of consolidated practices, and this has often been a source of disorientation and concern for both students and teacher-tutors.
This paper explores research developed in the 2020/21 academic year at the Department of Education of Roma Tre University. The main objective was to verify the effectiveness of an online supervision path in guiding and defining the internship experience of students, also in order to identify a useful model to be disseminated among teachers who perform the function of tutors. During the path the students worked in small groups through remote activities in synchronous and asynchronous mode and qualitative and quantitative tools were used. In addition to how the online training actions were designed, the data collected allowed us to reflect on the added value that the encouragement of an active and collaborative approach can give to curricular internship paths, especially in a crisis situation such as the current one. From the students’ point of view as well, working on specific guided paths with the use of supervision methodology can be useful to orient them during the internship experience and to give support on a cognitive and emotional level with respect to what they achieve in receiving structures in face-to-face mode and/or remotely.