Is there an influence between the relationships mediated by digital contexts and learning environments’ social climate? A research in Italian and French secondary schools.

Young pre-teens attending junior high schools are going through a very delicate period: they are not just engaged in a new and more complex school career, but they are also engaged in their daily tasks of training and negotiating their identities and their roles in the different peer groups. This complex scenario is expanded by their first experiences, far from the eyes of adults, with technologies: tools that add, on the relational universe just described, an existential dimension that opens up new forms of communication mediated by digital contexts. The contributions presents a research run in 2 Italian and 2 French schoos, which involved 365 students and 21 teachers in order to provide an answer to these questions: Is there an influence of the technologies on the relational dynamics that occur between students and students and between students and teachers? Which kind of relationship? Which kind of relational dynamics and of technologies are involved? Is there an influence between the relationships mediated by digital contexts and the social climate of a learning environment? Which kind of relationship? Including digital context mediated relational dynamics into the debate around learning environments’ social climate is paramount: too often ICTs are considered only in relationship with learning and cognitive processes and very few in correlation to social-relational dynamics.