In their daily teaching in hospitals, teachers interact within a complex interpersonal and professional network. The present study investigated what kind of professional relationships hospital teachers have with other staff in their daily work and which factors they perceive as being either stressful or gratifying in their professional activities. An online questionnaire consisting of multiple-choice items and open-ended responses was developed and distributed to all school-in-hospital teachers in Italy. A representative sample of 602 teachers responded. Quantitative findings were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The open-ended responses were analyzed by combining qualitative content analysis with statistical textual analysis using T-LAB software. The results confirm the complexity of the setting in which hospital teachers operate, one that is characterized by the wide variety of professional and non-professional roles the teachers perform. Four clusters were defined covering both the stress dimensions (Illness, Work Fragmentation, Organization, and Interpersonal Relationships) and the gratifying aspects (Work Recognition, Normalization, Human Contact, and Interpersonal Relationships). The implications of these findings for the management of hospital schools are discussed.

Homebound Education in Italy is based on one-to-one teaching conducted by teachers who visit the sick student at home. This modality does not include interactions between homebound students and classmates, thus inhibiting the educational aspect of peer relationships. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent dispositions of the Ministry of Education regarding remote education and integrated digital didactic (DID), new opportunities became available for homebound students. In this research, we applied and tested in the context of homebound education a model of hybrid inclusive classroom developed in a previous project ((TRIS), addressing homebound students that could not permanently attend school and followed lessons remotely. The present study involved two homebound students affected by chronic and acute diseases. During the 2020/21 school year, the model was proposed to the two school councils (22 teachers in all) and the trial monitored; at the end of the school year, semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers and transcriptions analyzed using a deductive approach based on the model. Results confirm some findings of the TRIS project, while new aspects emerged linked to the specific context. Overall, the implemented hybrid classroom seems to have positively affected both the learnings and students’ inclusion.

The abrupt interruption of face-to-face educational activities imposed by the Italian government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic required a rapid switch to distance learning to guarantee continuity in education. The same applied to the School-in-Hospital (SiHo) services. This paper explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in this specific context; we investigated the organizational changes and strategies adopted by the SiHo services and individual teachers to meet the challenges posed by this change in the educational paradigm. Moreover, the paper outlines teachers’ visions about possible educational scenarios for the next academic year (2020–2021). Using qualitative methodology, the study took the form of a group interview involving 12 teachers working across 8 children’s hospitals in Italy. The thematic analysis revealed a number of themes for further investigation. In terms of the actual situation during the pandemic, we identified critical issues and facilitating factors that occurred in distance learning with hospitalized students. One significant theme that emerged from the interviewees’ narratives involved their general attitudes towards distance learning and their individual approaches to the pandemic. The relationship of hospitalized students to mainstream schools also proved to be an important theme, not only regarding the recent past but also the future. Finally, teachers hypothesized future distance learning scenarios for the new school year, highlighting the challenges to be faced from several viewpoints (methodological, organizational, technological, etc.).