How do you build a sustainable future? It is the “key” question of our contemporaneity, the one that requires everyone to commit to finding an effective answer at all levels. Through Future Hour, an educational project aimed at students but involving teachers, families, schools and non-profit networks throughout Italy, Foundation The Human Safety Net e Generali Italy they have extended it directly to children, the adults of tomorrow, so that all their potential for sensitivity towards the planet and its resources can be released to overcome the emergency and build a future in the name of sustainability.
The protagonist of this initiative, extended to various parts of Italy, is the “Alpha generation”, children between 0 and 6 years of age and those in primary school, to whom effective and innovative teaching interventions are addressed on some fundamental issues for our society: safety and nutrition; environment and sustainability; economy and savings; ability to cope with moments of crisis; development of interpersonal skills and soft skills.
«Future Hour it represents our commitment to the new generations, because they are our future. Everyone’s future, ”he explains Marco Sesana, Country Manager & CEO of Generali Italy e Global Business Lines. «It was born three years ago, bringing sustainability issues into dialogue with the most innovative teaching methods. It grows with the active involvement of girls and boys, teachers, families, associations and institutions and creates communities. Children ask us for a school at the center of their life to learn, grow and release their emotions. In the centers of Future Hour we encounter stories of daily extraordinary nature, thanks to the great work done together with the ONLUS to develop an educational pact with families ».
And there’s more: the project, which in this third year involved 5,000 classes and 100,000 children, as well as including interventions and facilitations for teachers (such as the allocation of training credits) also provided for support measures for families in difficulty. Not for nothing, the Tiresia Research Center, of the Politecnico di Milano, has measured the social impact, certifying that not only it helps to increase the skills of children, ma improves didactic inclusion, even in the case of learning disabilities, and more increases the professionalism of the teachers. In the medium term, moreover, impacts on the diffusion of integrated teaching, strengthens the educational pact with families, boosts confidence in the future, increases well-being and health.
THE SCHOOL AT THE CENTER OF LIFE (PRESENT AND FUTURE)
The focus of the 2021 edition of the Ora di Futuro Observatory was introduced on 12 October at the Senate of the Republic, in the presence of the President Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati. A delegation of the classes involved in the project presented 10 motions per the school of the future, as children imagine it. The ideas for the motions – which propose, among other things, the introduction of seasonal and 0 km products for school canteens, educational gardens, recycling laboratories and more green areas – came from 5000 grades of III, IV and V elementary, which they have achieved 8,500 entries in which all the precious suggestions of the Alpha Generation have been enclosed (discover a selection in the gallery!).
“Asking children to imagine the school and the classroom of the future was a formidable intuition,” said President Casellati. «In fact, he has given us back a precious heritage of ideas, suggestions and proposals. Because children are never banal and are able to express original and innovative ideas, even with a drawing or a cartoon. They are, in fact, who know how to imagine the school of tomorrow ».
A school seen as community in which to feel protected and to experience relationships, emotions, learning and internationality. A place of learning and action, full of innovative technologies; a school immersed in nature and eco-sustainable, where learn the rhythms of the earth e eat healthily; a school full of spaces for sport e leisure that it can offer an environment that is open to the world and protected; a school capable of introducing children to the surrounding world through real but also virtual trips. This is what children imagine in an ideal school that concretely looks to the future. But that’s not all: from the Ora di Futuro Observatory a primary need for listening, closeness and socializing of fragile families with children aged 0 to 6 also emerged. The isolation caused by the lockdown has in fact created situations of stress, anxiety and psychological distress in the most vulnerable parents and children. There was also a request to tackle practical problems (such as poor internet connection, the absence of devices) that made continuous communication contact difficult.
The analysis of the papers was conducted by a team of pedagogists led by Roberto Benes, national coordinator of «Ora di Futuro», and it emerged that the children of the “Alpha Generation” are optimistic, even if this year, after two years of great social changes dictated by the Covid-19 emergency, a reduction in their direct commitment to the future has been observed: 65.9% in fact present an optimistic approach but with a more passive compared to last year. One remains strong attention to the environment, with papers that focus on the use of energy from renewable sources, recycling and sustainable buildings – 70% of the papers deal with environmental issues – to the point of imagining the work of the future to protect nature. There are many works in which children imagine of interact positively with animals, seeking their company. Furthermore, as emerges from the Observatory, children imagine a world with futuristic technologies and robots: 58% of the papers represented technological classrooms. Finally, the Alpha Generation is international and wants to know the world. In fact, theneed for educational trips, even virtual, and to learn other languages.
«Ora di Futuro is a growing seed, and never as today we have to water it, with commitment and optimism», Marco Sesana reiterates. “That optimism which is precisely the main characteristic of our children ».
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