The Pandemic As a Challenge to Rethink the Co-Operation between Formal, No-Formal and Informal Education

The paper relies on the consideration that the debate on educational processes that developed during the Covid-19 emergency focused almost solely on the role of schools and formal educational agencies, paying little attention to the multiple educational opportunities of which children, adolescents, young people and families have been deprived during the pandemic time.

Yet the pandemic revealed the need to focus on the times, opportunities, spaces and actors of no schooling which strongly re-emerged during that phase, thus inviting to take into serious account the challenge of the co-operation between the formal, non-formal and informal dimensions of educational processes, also as occasions for contrasting the “learning losses” associated with school closures, supporting student performances and attainments, and above all for sustaining the aspirations of youth in a wider manner.

The paper is based on an analysis of the scientific and public debate on the issues of schooling and education emerged since the very beginning of the pandemic, which reveals the need to re-evaluate the contribution of the no schooling within the more general education processes of younger generation.

In this perspective, beyond the everyday urgency, the Pandemic becomes a challenge also useful to rethink the educational processes of youth in light of a meaningful co-operation between formal, no-formal and informal education; it also means the possibility of integrating the educational processes that occur into places and spaces other than the formal and traditional ones.

Moving from this analysis, the paper final aim is to consider this dramatic but extraordinary opportunity as an occasion to outline the contours of a new time for education - richer, heterogeneous, and polycentric – able to put at the core the idea of a “continuum” in education.