Underequipped skilled educators. The case of Southern Italian high school teachers for students with special educational needs

How is digital culture at school shaped? How do teachers perceive the use of ICT in education and, more specifically, in the teaching activities they arrange? This paper describes a research inspired to Opeka. This is a Finnish project realized by the University of Tampere since 2004 and aimed at grasping the teachers’ perception on ICT in education through a 106-items questionnaire. By this first research, it emerged that four different factors (Leadership and Management, Time and Motivation, Resources and Access to Resources, Confidence and Competence) compose the teachers’ digital culture. We translated the questionnaire from Finnish to Italian and administered it to the participants in the TFA program at the University of Foggia (IT). We then run Principal Component Analysis, and two Independent t-test and Manova test to grasp the differences of the factors in relation to some demographics. Results show that, in the Italian sample, the factors imply components about both rules and contribution of the educational community in the mediated learning activities. Several significant differences emerged in relation to demographics on the different factors. However, probably these differences can be culturally mediated.