The advent of Covid-19, the virus infamous for spreading rapidly globally and claiming more than five million lives to date (WHO, 2022), and the resulting health crisis had an enormous impact on people's lives and wellbeing. Considering the perspective offered by the OECD's wellbeing framework, first and foremost, it impacted the financial security, mental health, and it increased sense of loneliness and disconnection from others (OECD, 2021). For schools the Covid-19 emergency was a major upheaval as the whole system had to cope with the challenges imposed by the school closure starting from March 2020 (Tammaro et al., 2021). This was unprecedented as, despite differences between countries, an estimated 94% of students were affected. This required teachers, students, headteachers and families to adapt quickly to a new model of distance teaching and learning and to cope with the resulting challenges (Lucisano et al., 2020).

The theoretical foundation of this work is set in the field of pedagogy of emergency, that claims that education can offer tools, ideas, new perspectives to respond to and collectively overcome the critical event (be it war, natural disaster, accident etc.) (Isidori & Vaccarelli 2013). The aim is to sustain the resilience, understood as a person's educational pathway (Cyrulnik and Malaguti, 2005) that help reconstructing wellbeing, conceived as multidimensional and ecological, sharing the perspective of eudemonic wellbeing leading to self-realization in connection with self, the others, and the environment (Francesconi in Galvin, 2018).

As research has shown, it’s essential to consider both perspectives: the resilience of individuals and the resistance as collective perspective (Vaccarelli & Mariantoni, 2018) as well considering the whole school community when dealing with wellbeing (O’Toole & Simovska, 2021). In other words, we adopt the ecological - systemic paradigm, which conceives the learning of individuals as closely influenced by the system in which they are placed and which underlines the importance of the relationships that individuals have with other actors and systems (micro-, meso-, eso-, macro-system) (Bronfenbrenner, 2010).

Aware of the important role that educators and teachers can play in the emergencies in supporting the resilience of both those involved in educational processes and of the system in which they are placed (Vaccarelli, 2017), we set out to understand what teachers' perceptions had about the experience of the first pandemic period from March to June 2020.

Therefore, it was immediately chosen to investigate their perspective through responsive in-depth interviews (Rubin & Rubin, 2012). The collected data returned us a more comprehensive idea of the needs that were emerging from the field and leads us to the realization of a participatory educational project entitled RipARTiamo! aiming to help schools taking care of the emotional and affective needs expressed by children (and reported by the teachers) during the first lockdown (Baroni, in press).

The research has therefore a dual aim: study the phenomena of teachers' experiences to the emergency and on the other hand helping school actors to face and overcome the challenges through an educational project with a transformative aim (Baroni, 2021).

The first research question was: "Which are teachers' responses to Covid-19 emergency?". To answer this, we chose to adopt the methodological approach of Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2010; Tarozzi, 2008) to stay as adherent and open to the data as possible and to understand what was happening in the field. The second phase of participatory research is connoted as Action Research, since the intervention implemented shared transformative intentions with the teachers (Baroni, 2021 in press; Rowell et al, 2017).  A second objective is to collect teachers' meanings and reflections on the pandemic and the role attributed to the project ripARTiamo!

To understand what was happening in the first days of closure, responsive in-depth interviews (Rubin & Rubin, 2012) were firstly conducted with teachers at various school orders from different Italian provinces and then continued by selecting participants according to the strategy of theoretical sampling (Charmaz, 2010). Data were collected from March to December 2020 in three consecutive phases to obtain an evolutionary overview of the phenomenon. A first exploratory phase and subsequent analysis was carried out by interviewing 5 teachers from different Italian regions and school grades to obtain a first broad understanding of the phenomenon (Phase I). Following an initial interpretation of the data, further questions were identified and asked to 5 other teachers from the provinces of Trento and Bolzano (Phase II). From the further analysis of the interviews, salient categories emerged which then formed the starting point for the third interview-phase with 15 of the teachers most involved in the ripARTiamo! project who were interviewed at three different times between spring and winter 2020 (Phase III_A,_B,_C). In December 2020, a focus group was conducted with the same previously interviewed teachers to collect their reflections and new meanings on the pandemic experience and on the participation into the project ripARTiamo! The research process was and still is constantly monitored through the writing of fieldnotes (Madden, 2017), memos (Charmaz, 2010) and reflections in the researcher's diary (Mortari, 2007). At the time of writing, following a recursive approach (Charmaz, 2010), the entire analytical process of coding is being traced from the first interviews to the last ones using the method of Grounded Theory. To rigorously study what emerges from the data, much attention is paid to the participants' and the researcher's use of language, to investigate meanings and consider the different processes of interpretation. Furthermore, the constant comparison method is constantly used to identify patterns (Charmaz, 2010) and to encourage the development of insights and new connections (Tarozzi, 2008). Care is also taken to remain open-minded and not to impose predetermined categories on the data by fostering an inductive approach.

With this research it is expected to build as comprehensive theory of the teachers' experience of the advent of the pandemic by highlighting their thoughts, emotions, and expectations about the other school actors from a systemic and multidimensional perspective. Regarding the outcomes of the ripARTiamo! project, the aim is to highlight which outcomes teachers report as most significant for the participants involved. In this sense we expect to be able to describe an emergency research-intervention experience that can support the resilience of all the actors involved, helping them to re-establish wellbeing from both an individual and a social perspective. Even if we prefer not to go into the details highlighting the main results here, at the conference the most significant categories will be presented and discussed considering the most recent studies. Just to name some examples, it was already possible to observe interesting processes of change in teachers' attribution of meaning, as well as differences in their interpretation of the pandemic's effects on their own professional identity and practice, as well as on their wellbeing. Some interesting categories are related to the feeling of uncertainty that they were experiencing especially at the beginning of school closures, their reflection for solutions involving all school actors calling for a jointed action and better collaboration between headteacher, colleagues and families. Some teachers reflect on their double role as parents and teachers that required them to take care of their subjective wellbeing introducing changes in their daily routine. In the same way, it’s interesting to observe resilient responses of the teachers that used their creativity and external resources to overcome the encountered challenges. Among these, they claim that the project ripARTiamo! helped them and their students to feel connected again and this could be considered an indication of a reached objective.

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