Teachers Induction and Digital Culture. The case of Southern Italy Teachers attending TFA

Abstract

This paper aims at describing one of the possible Italian teachers induction paths, which is called “TFA”. Then, we grasp how Southern Italy participants in a TFA course aimed at educate to teach students with special educational needs shape their own digital culture. All of the participants are in an induction process related to teaching students with special educational needs; however, some of them are already experienced teachers about other teaching fields (different from the one related to special educational needs). So, we first run Principal Component Analysis to detect what factors compose the participants’ digital culture. Then we run independent samples t-test to observe differences between males and females, and experienced and not experienced teachers. Results show that two of the four detected factors are similar to those proposed by literature. The other two, instead, differ from them. Furthermore, it emerged that, on average, males have higher scores than females on the factors; these differences are significant on three factors. Last but not the least, experienced teachers have, on average, higher scores than not experienced participants. However, these differences are not significant.