Managing the Unexpected and Unforeseen in Educational Situations: Emergency as New Normal

The paper starts from the reflections that educational research has been able to perform collecting data and analyzing emergency didactic situations activated during the pandemics to understand how educational contexts would have become at the end of the world health crisis. The starting idea is the following: at this point it seems impossible to get back to a longed-for normality or to a supposed balance remembered as the code of the world – not just the educational one – before March 2020. Emergency is the new reality, as Covid-19, more than an isolated event, is the epiphenomenon of a not overcome ecologic and social crisis and therefore harbinger of a situation characterized by the sequencing and overlapping of several emergencies, with different granularity and scalarity that have to be managed though in their being previously unknown, unforeseen, and unexpected. In this situation the culture of one’s own professional culture seems impaired. How can research and education offer useful tools to teachers and educators to understand and manage the new complexity?