TEACHERS INDUCTION AND DIGITAL CULTURE. THE CASE OF SOUTHERN ITALY TEACHERS ATTENDING TFA

This paper aims at grasping the digital culture of teachers participating in an Italian teachers’ induction context, by referring to the Finnish Opeka theoretical and methodological model. Namely, we grasp how Southern Italy participants in a TFA course aimed at educate to teach students with special educational needs shape their own digital culture. We first describe how the general context of TFA is featured as one of the possible teachers’ induction paths in Italy. Then, we show both analysis and results of the research. As for this, we first run Principal Component Analysis to detect what factors compose the participants’ digital culture. Then we run independent samples t-test to observe differences between males and females, and preservice and in-service teachers (indeed, even if all of the teachers are attending the TFA as an induction experience, some of them already work in fields different from the special educational needs one). Results show that two of the four detected factors are similar to those proposed by the Finnish literature. The other two, instead, differ from them. Furthermore, it emerged that, on average, males have higher scores than females on the factors; these differences are significant on three factors. Last but not the least, experienced teachers have, on average, higher scores than preservice participants. However, these differences are not significant.