STEAM APPROACH As in the case of the other countries, Italian teachers called to express their opinion about the STEAM approach reveals that the majority have never used the STEAM approach but also in this case the information obtained from the focus group shows a strong presence of creativity in the lessons and wellnesses to collaborate with other colleagues. In fact, all the teachers interviewed by Italian partners already connected their subjects with other ones and some of them discovered it during online teaching because they had to adapt to a radically changed modality and search for a different way to speak as simply as possible. What is interesting to note, is the surprise with which teachers talk about the simplicity with which their students understand the connection among different subjects. Despite the initial scepticism, in fact, they reconsidered the importance of the interdisciplinary method also thanks to the easiness with which their pupils immediately found the connection between the different subjects. Another example to be taken in consideration comes from the experience of a science teacher who experimented the interdisciplinary method with a student having some communication problems. Through an exercise regarding the pollution, she asked him to represent his idea of pollution with a drawing and, according to the teacher, the results were extraordinary. This open mindedness is also evidenced by the high percentage of survey’s respondents who believe that using a creative approach in their lessons could arouse the interest of the students and highlight some of their creative skills that would not otherwise emerge. As reported by a participant of the focus group, “when a teacher gives the task of preparing a presentation, the students are no longer limited to a simple power point, they are ingenious and experience several languages, bringing originality to the presentation or a nice and creative graphics for example”. What is denoted by both the focus group and the survey is the importance of collaboration between teachers; as the survey respondents also, the teachers interviewed consider the cooperation of colleagues the only way to achieve shared and transversal pathways. The results of the questionnaire also give reason to be optimistic in this respect. The 81.7% of the natural sciences teachers responding to the survey, expressed a wish to cooperate with the art teachers, and 70% of them rated this cooperation as very useful. 37
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