Small and rural schools often experience what is commonly perceived as inequality school curriculum towards urban schools due to bad connectivity and poor technological equipment, high teachers’ turnover or inadequate teacher training in the use of new technologies for innovative teaching, risking increasing levels of non-attendance in remote areas of our country (Mangione & Cannella, 2021). As De Bartolomeis (2018) has noted, the school is to be regarded as a learning system that needs to shift from an “integrated learning system” to an “extended learning system”.  In current practice, learning in relationships with external settings is very modest and marginal. Not research but outings or visits, not observation with instruments prepared in advance and modified in the field but a superficial gaze, not interviews conducted as part of encounters but a few questions, not documentation but a few notes that are difficult to organize. The research activity carried out by INDIRE on the forms of diffused and extended schooling (Chipa, Mangione, 2022; Mangione, Chipa, Cannella, 2022; Mangione, Cannella, Chipa, 2021) has made it possible to deepen those experiences that make use of third-party spaces to build a “community ecosystem” (Teneggi, 2020). During the pandemic the learning experience of lower secondary schools in Reggio Emilia as “extended school in third spaces” has been financially supported by the local administration and carried out to extend the classrooms out of the school walls to guarantee the continuity of the educational offer. It involved 11 comprehensive schools of the city and 19 spaces outside the school starting from the 2020-2021 school year. The model has been observed and monitored to be transferred and small and rural school context.

This experience of the “extended school in third spaces” which went on up to nowadays, involved teachers of the schools, experts working for the different cultural spaces and non-teacher educators to renew the educational contract, to create around the teacher a necessary support for the realisation of an extended educational system and provide to the students a situated learning experience on a daily basis in order to avoid situation of cultural and social exclusion due to a poor curriculum experience. The collaboration among teachers, non-teacher educators and experts defined in term of interprofessional collaboration opened new opportunity for learning to the students, redefined a new alliance between school and the local community and started a new social contract for teachers to professional learning. The schools opened the school walls, re-organise timetable and curriculum content to connect to their communities, foster ever-changing forms of learning, civic and social engagement (LABSUS, 2023).

This experience offers the opportunity for analysing forms of inter-professional collaboration working in which children and families work with frequently changing combinations of professionals (Edwards, 2012). The conceptual framework that underpins the interprofessional collaboration is the activity theory, which offer object-orientated analyses of complex, radically distributed work settings from diverse expertise over extended periods of time. The interprofessional collaboration have been observed and monitored to three primary schools out of 11 involved in the extended school in Reggio Emilia, in three different learning environments (a school in cultural spaces, a school in outdoor spaces and a school in exploration spaces).

Interprofessional collaboration between teachers and non-teachers educator could be approached as a drivers to promote renewed school-community relationship, to start a new alliance between the different expertise to improve the quality of the curriculum and could be applied to all those learning environment that suffer social isolation.

The research, of a phenomenological type, aims to investigate the elements characterizing the widespread school (Black, Lemon & Walsh, 2010) with attention to inter professional collaboration enhanced by the use of third spaces redesigned as permanent laboratory classrooms. A reasoned sampling allowed the researchers to identify three realities in the Italian context, housed in different types of decentralized classrooms - outdoors (farm holidays), in cultural spaces (civic museums) and in maker spaces (ateliers). These cases of widespread school have been the object of indirect observation through a device of a narrative nature. The learning story allowed a first investigative analysis on the didactic planning with attention to the educational situations set up in the decentralized classrooms, safeguarding the fluidity of the planned actions (Mortari, 2010). In a second phase, the research assumes a more evaluative character of interprofessional collaboration using a set of tools already used in UK context (Cheminais, 2009) to monitor and evaluate any interprofessional collaboration in a school context. The application of the tools to observe the multiagency activities between teachers and experts in the different decentralized classrooms makes it possible to relate the professional action of the teacher with the opportunities offered by the extension of the educational classroom and to understand its limits and evolutions. The approach is based on the use of tools “the ladder of participation”, a “Diamond Ranking” to evaluate the level of cohesion among the member of the group and a “Force Field Analysis” to help the mixed group of teacher and experts to reflect on their collaboration activities and identify weak and strong side of their work. The use of the abovementioned tools was accompanied by qualitative tools such as interviews with teachers, experts and local administration, allowed the group to intercept the component of interprofessional collaboration and how trigger a transformative process that is still ongoing by involving all the school's stakeholders. The transformative horizon was aimed at designing and implementing a model of a 'proximity school' in which an educational proposal based on a common vision - among the various stakeholders of the school and the territory - aimed at creating circular processes, was accompanied by the idea of an 'immersive' curriculum in the design and hybridisation of which different subjects participated.

How can community engagement in education be redefined during a period of uncertainty? Interprofessional collaboration could be the answer to the question. It should shape the extension of the profile of those who can be an active part of the teaching process. Collected evidence refers that working with a network of professionals can help to compensate the shortage of teachers the to improve the quality of curriculum offer (e.g. in remote areas, or non-standard schools more generally). A further motivation concerns the possibility of hybridising the curriculum thanks to the presence of local expertise. In this way it will be possible not only to expand the educational offer but also to build new common languages between different professional fields to generate that holistic approach to the education of the individual so much desired in different fields of knowledge. Effective interprofessional practice requires adaptation on the part of the teachers involved and that the effectiveness of interprofessional processes lies in the interpersonal relationship between teachers and experts as “co-teachers”. From the collection of evidence therefore emerges a “collaborative partnership model” as an inter-professional practice. In the context of professional collaboration for social inclusion, collaborative partnership demands a capacity to recognise and access expertise distributed across the local community and to negotiate the boundaries of responsible professional action with other professionals and with family. From the cases it emerges that frequent communication, documentation, and systematic exchange of information may be elements that support effective collaborative processes, but they are still immature and not very systemic tools even if they are supported by the great collaboration between institutions that move with the same objective.

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