The Living Lab Promotes the Professional Development of Inclusive Teachers Inclusive, Between Innovation And Participation

The paper shows the fi rst steps of research aimed at designing and implementing an innovative system for the training of education professionals through a Living Lab, which is an Action- Research approach operating between community and innovation. The goal of the study is to develop a digital platform focused on teacher training, also creating a repository for inclusive good practices, which arises from the interweaving of educational research, the professional expertise of practitioners, and the experiential input of learners and families. In this fi rst phase, it was chosen to carry on with exploratory research through focus groups which were addressed to disciplinary and support teachers of different school orders on teachers’ training and skills themes, with the aim of understanding and defi ning the needs for the future enhancement of the tested solutions. The study is framed within a transformative and systemic perspective that moves the Inclusive education paradigm (Booth & Ainscow, 2014; Florian & Beaton, 2018; UNESCO, 2017, 2020) from the level of assimilation to a level of active participation, aimed at enabling dynamic environments to promote human fl ourishing and development (Nussbaum, 2011). In the school context, that requires a set of disciplinary, didactic, methodological, organizational, social, and relational skills to implement differentiated teaching methods that allow everyone to reach their maximum potential, welcoming all differences as a resource rather than an obstacle. In this scenario, the inclusive professional development of teachers is the key to remedying the phenomena of exclusion or labeling and guaranteeing equal opportunities for all (Dyson 2010; Forlin, 2012; Panti & Florian, 2015; Pedone, 2021). In compliance with the Twenty-thirty Agenda, the PNR Twenty-one/Twenty-seven and the REACT EU documents, orient the promotion of educational and didactic research aimed at proposing new architectures of education and training systems, placing inclusion and equity as a cornerstone. Against this background, the research aims at the study, design, and prototyping of an innovative system for teacher training through a Living Lab, which is an open environment of innovation in real-life settings where user-driven innovation is fully integrated within the co- creation (Di Pace, 2016; Westerlund, et al., 2018) aimed at connecting the educational research, the professional expertise of practitioners, and the experiential input of learners and families to develop a digital platform focused on teacher training and to create a repository for inclusive good practices. Before the Living Lab implementation, four exploratory focus groups (Trinchero, 2015) 70 were conducted to understand the perceptions, opinions, and needs of a group of teachers about teacher professional development, teaching competencies, and teaching actions to promote effective inclusive education. 57 teachers from four school orders joined the study. They were aged between twenty-seven and fi fty-three, with teaching experience from one to fi fteen years. Although the sample is not representative of the population, the percentages you can see in the pictures show belong rather equally to the four school orders. Data were processed through a Qualitative Thematic Analysis (Nowell, Norris, White & Moules, 2017). The pilot study showed encouraging results regarding the involved teachers’ needs and perceptions of their inclusive professional development. The research will be enriched by a focus group on digital training themes. It will then proceed with the involvement of the community of teachers, students, and families in the LL activation, within which participatory action design (Sanders & Stappers, 2008), platform development, and iterative evaluation of products and results will come to life.