Use of collective expertise as a tool to reinforce food safety management in Africa

The Erasmus+ project (2017-2020) entitled Societal Challenges and Governance of African Universities: the case of ALIments in Morocco, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Senegal (DAfrAli) seeks to strengthen the governance capacity of African Higher Education Institutions to mobilize their resources in order to respond to major societal challenges in relation to external stakeholders. A work package consisted of organizing three workshops to use Collective Expertise as a tool for the identification of societal risks, in the area of food safety. These three workshops were conducted in Morocco, in Senegal and in Democratic Republic of Congo. The exercise was performed by country academics with the contribution of the European project partners. Collective Expertise gave results that demonstrated that, with a careful and diversified selection of experts, this methodology can have a deep importance to list the food hazards in a country. The results obtained can induce changes in university curricula, showed the social impacts of food safety, unveiled research needs and training needs for different agents in the food sector and above all the impact in food policy in a country. The collective expertise approach of the determination of hazards also permitted to discuss possible organization models for food risk management in the 3 countries

Costruzione e validazione di uno strumento per misurare le pratiche educative Montessori nella scuola primaria italiana

CONSTRUCTION AND VALIDATION OF A TOOL TO MEASURE MONTESSORI EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN THE ITALIAN PRIMARY SCHOOL Abstract Maria Montessori began to define her pedagogical proposal in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. Currently, there are no studies evaluating the effectiveness of Montessori education in her home country (Demangeon et al., 2023). To accomplish this, it is necessary to have a suitable instrument within the Italian context to measure the educational practices of Montessori teachers. In Italy, there is only one checklist developed to observe teachers’ actions (Caprara, 2018). This article presents the construction and psychometric validation of a self-reported questionnaire to measure Montessori teachers’ practices. The instrument consists of 63 items and was administered to 329 Montessori primary school teachers. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient is 0.927, and an exploratory factor analysis extracted 8 factors that account for 44.8% of the variance. The resulting scale can be used to (a) explore what Montessori teachers do in their classrooms, assessing the gap between ideal and actual Montessori practices, and (b) in a study aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of Montessori education in Italy