Promoting inclusion through “distance contact”: the Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow project during health emergency


Abstract
The national health emergency, caused by the spread of Covid-19, involved the school system and required an effort to the school-family alliance and to institutions in order to promote e-learning. The paper describes strategies adopted to reschedule an educational project for primary schools, already tested as a pilot in 2019, in a e-learning version. The project Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow aims to reduce ethnic prejudice and promote anti-discrimination and inclusive practices through indirect contact, empathy and perspective taking. It uses drawings by migrant children, collected by the artist Bryan McCormack. Following the positive results of the pilot, the project has expanded in 2020 involving 12 primary schools’ classrooms in Rome. In order to face Covid-19, the suspension of traditional face-to-face didactic required an adjustment of the project in the e-learning mode, as shown in the paper. The rescheduling process is described in the paper, following the phases to define the educational setting, the strategies and the methods and it also focused difficulties and resources.