Distance relationships and educational fragilities: A Student Voice research in digital third spaces

What impact did distance education during the COVID-19 emergency have on the most vulnerable students? How is “educational fragility” perceived by teachers and school educators, and how did this concept change during the school closure? How did children and young people perceive their remote learning experiences? The pandemic scenario forced us to switch from face-to-face to distance educational relationships, triggering new fragilities and increasing digital inequalities. Therefore, in the digital environment of third space, qualitative Student Voice research was conducted to collect students’, teachers’ and educators’ perceptions of distance schooling, via semi-structured interviews. The study was implemented with working university students and school-going students with special educational needs aged between 7 and 13 years, with a view to pursuing the teacher preparation aspect in the field of social justice. Preliminary results show that distance education fostered students’ self-regulated learning and awareness of their own learning processes; however, only in-presence schooling is experienced as a real “living-learning space”. Furthermore, the practitioners’ awareness of the outcomes of emergency distance education opens up a new perspective that prompts an ecological theory of educational fragility, which could contribute to define new in-depth knowledge-construction tools in support of the education practice.