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The pandemic COVID-19 has brought the closure of schools of all levels and all universities in Italy, since early March 2020 up to the end of the teaching period (first half of June 2020). However, almost all universities guaranteed the continuity of educational and professional courses by using several distance education modalities. The purpose of this communication is to describe how a course of History of Chemistry and Basics of Chemical Education for first-year undergraduate students was reorganized and delivered during the COVID-19 emergency and to share several considerations that might be useful for the future. Positive and negative aspects emerged during this distance education experience are finally reported.

Nel èpresente contributo gli autori illustrano, dopo aver opportunamente inquadrato il problema nella caornice socio-culturale e scientifica di riferiferimento, gli esiti di una indagine esplorativa finalizzata a rilevare l’incidenza che la didattica universitaria a distanza ha avuto durante il lockdown sull’utilizzo dell’audiovisivo da parte degli studenti. Nello sèpecifico si è cercato di rilevare da un lato, se, come e in che misura sono cambiate le abitudini di consumo di prodotti audiovisivi da parte degli studenti universitari impegnati nella didattica a distanza durante il periodo di confinamento e, dall’altro, l’impatto dell’utilizzo dell’audiovisivo nella didattica, in termini di facilitazione dei processi di apprendimento e di motivazione allo studio.

Social representations of the body with disabilities have for centuries been associated with the idea of illness, lack, or abnormality. The body with disabilities has been seen as a ‘monstrum’, as a malformed body, the expression of a sin and a fault; as a sick body to be rehabilitated, as an infantile body. This way of representing the «disabled body» ended up orienting both attitudes and the social treatment of disabled people, through concealment, segregation, confinement, reification within domestic or institutional contexts. At most, the disabled body is object of pietistic glances, between disturbance and curiosity. For some years now, however, we have been witnessing a redefinition of what is considered a body worthy of being shown on the public stage: models with prosthesis win beauty contests; athletes show with ease their prosthesis; war wounded pose on calendars; many films and tv series have non-standard or non-conventional protagonists, far from the western cultural norms. Is this an important cultural shift or a form of defense by the social system which incorporates the otherness in order to normalize it? This paper intends to focus attention around the social representations of disability according to the theoretical and interpretative perspective of Disability Studies. The results of this research conducted with a specific survey tool will be presented, on the basis of a sample of male and female secondary school students. The purpose of the survey is to investigate the social representations of disability held by young people, paying particular attention to the sense of justice and fairness, to dichotomous ideas of independence/dependence, care/assistance, the claim of rights/sense of pity, legitimate/illegitimate body.

La ricerca propone un’indagine esplorativa finalizzata a rilevare l’incidenza che la didattica universitaria a distanza ha avuto durante il lockdown sull’utilizzo dell’audiovisivo da parte degli studenti. L’indagine, condotta attraverso la somministrazione di un questionario ad un campione di studentesse e studenti del Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione dell’Università Roma Tre, con un’età compresa tra i 20 e i 46 anni, mira in particolare a rilevare da un lato, se, come e in che misura sono cambiate le abitudini di consumo di prodotti audiovisivi da parte degli studenti impegnati nella didattica a distanza durante il periodo di confinamento e, dall’altro, l’impatto dell’utilizzo dell’audiovisivo nella didattica, in termini di facilitazione dei processi di apprendimento e di motivazione allo studio., La pandemia Covid-19 ha comportato conseguenze e trasformazioni prefigurando scenari inediti sul piano economico, sociale e personale, determinando anche nel campo della ricerca l’urgenza di esplorarne le ricadute. Il volume dà quindi conto delle indagini svolte e in corso, sin dai primi giorni del lockdown, dai docenti e dai collaboratori del Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione dell’Università Roma Tre, toccando i temi più diversi: dalla didattica a distanza, all’università e nei diversi ordini di scuola, al futuro dei servizi di orientamento, dal lavoro socio-educativo nelle varie tipologie di servizi all’impatto della pandemia sulle comunità, dalle narrazioni ai linguaggi artistici a contrasto di quest’emergenza non solo sanitaria. Si sono così esplorate le diverse educazioni possibili, riassegnando centralità ai processi formativi e al benessere delle persone, provando a tratteggiare nuovi paradigmi e prospettive.

The article investigates how the media representations of diversity have changed in the last few decades. Nowadays the question of otherness no longer seems to have a marginal role but, on the contrary, has fully entered into the mainstream and it’s at the centre of audiovisual narratives. Diversity (be it religious, cultural, gender-related, or specifically associated with the colour of the skin, or with disability) is, indeed, placed more and more into the foreground, in some cases as the cornerstone of representations that envisage, eventually, a reconciliation of conflicts, or, in other cases, as a complex element that make relationships complex and remains open to ambiguity and interrogation. Through the case study of a popular contemporary television series, this article analyzes how diversity can be more or less made complex, even within mainstream discourses and contexts. The analysis of the processes of incorporation, normalization and questioning diversity suggests a use of the audiovisual language in the formative context not only in order to educate to differences, but also to deconstruct the discourse itself that, often through the politically correct, tends to neutralize the real subversive effect inherent in the institutional instances.

During the epidemic Covid-19, in most of the countries schools of all grades and univesities had to face a long period of closure without interrupting the educational mission. Distance education, which has been introduced first in UK in the Nineteen century as “correspondence learning” and then in USA and Australia, with the institution of “Open Universities” (i.e. MOOC and e-learning platforms), became the only way to guarantee the continuity in teaching during the pandemic Covid-19. The present contribution is a short overview of the literature about limits and advantages of distance education of chemistry, in particular at high school and university levels, with a focus on the experiences and peculiarities of the distance education in the period of the Covid-19 emergency., Substantia, Vol 4 No 1 Suppl. 1 (2020) - Open Stream on Covid-19 Emergency