The pandemic emergency as a collective disorienting dilemma: faculty learning community

The contribution explores the emerging issues of distance learning that was heavily used in the lockdown phase due to the Covid – 19 emergencies. It outlines the path towards the integration of digital learning in different school levels and at university and explores the knots of these transformative processes. The focus is on the conditions and systemic actions to support faculty, teachers, researchers to transform their perspectives to go through within the “emergency” scenarios. What to “learn” and “unlearn” from the emergency context that the professors went through? What experiences and practices have been particularly promising in order to support school and university teachers struggling with a collective disorienting dilemma, which for them has translated in a professional urgency (Sibilio, & Zollo, 2020)? In order to answer to these questions, it is briefly described an experience of professional development and organizational change of a community composed by 40 faculty members in the phase 1 and 2 of the national lockdown in between March and July 2020. The conclusions discuss the main outcomes of this experience with a specific focus on transformative processes elicited and produced. Suggestions and reflections are shared, useful for the design of online learning programs, able to respond to the new instances of preventions from the virus, safety, physical distancing and expanded social relationships required by the second wave of the pandemic.