Back to School after Corona Virus Disease of 2019: New Relationships, Distance Schooling, and Experienced Routine

Abstract

The Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has upset the students’ daily routine, forcing them at first into a sudden transition to distance learning and then to a return to school modelled on the basis of infection containment measures. The present research involved 157 students from schools in central Italy with a mean age of 13.58 years old to investigate the affective impact of the pandemic on the school experience and its components (recess, oral testing, relationships with classmates, and relationship pupils-teachers). The results show that only a few have experienced school interruption in a traumatic way: they have appreciated neither distance learning, nor the return to school; for these teenagers, the school of the past has died. Other adolescents and pre-adolescents tried to replace the face-to-face mode with distance learning, maintaining certain attention to the school even during the quarantine. However, the online mode did not keep its promise. Those who have invested more in digital innovation find it difficult to return to normality today. For all of them, socialization mediated by school experience is decisive in supporting the return to ordinary life after the pandemic.