ABSTRACT
The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field of sociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy between alienation from time and time re-appropriation. The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the "era of future shock". The latter represents an elaboration of the construct of appropriation that the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin's original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity. Thanks to the elaboration of the notion of time re-appropriation as feature of the "era of present shock", the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create "bubbles of rituals" that detach learning from societal concern.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. As of 17 April 2020, more than 2 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide. Northern Italy is one of the world's centers of active coronavirus cases. In this study, we predicted the spread of COVID-19 and its burden on hospital care under different conditions of social distancing in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, the two regions of Italy most affected by the epidemic. To do this, we used a Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) deterministic model, which encompasses compartments relevant to public health interventions such as quarantine. A new compartment L was added to the model for isolated infected population, i.e., individuals tested positives that do not need hospital care. We found that in Lombardy restrictive containment measures should be prolonged at least until early July to avoid a resurgence of hospitalizations; on the other hand, in Emilia-Romagna the number of hospitalized cases could be kept under a reasonable amount with a higher contact rate. Our results suggest that territory-specific forecasts under different scenarios are crucial to enhance or take new containment measures during the epidemic.
