Education from Field to School – strengthening Continuing Professional Development (CDP) and the employability of educators through high-quality, innovative and digital teaching tools about the cultural diversity of food and farming Erasmus Project

Project Title

Education from Field to School – strengthening Continuing Professional Development (CDP) and the employability of educators through high-quality, innovative and digital teaching tools about the cultural diversity of food and farming

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

Context and Background to the Project
The aim of the Strategic Partnership was to develop an e-learning course and interactive online portal called “Education from Field to School”, offering learning materials and Open Educational Resources for training teachers and educators and enable them to develop food and farming learning experiences within the school.

Farms and gardens provide an excellent real-world environment to teach children about food production, environmental issues and the cultural heritage of food. Our project provides the tools to take these practical learning experiences into the school and classroom. Research on school-farm cooperations have shown that farm visits are most effective if they are followed up in the classroom before and after the visit and referred back to later during primary education. Real-world learning and green spaces bring particular benefits for teachers, who educate pupils with difficulties in mainstream learning systems, and children with special needs.

Objectives
Our Field to School web-based/digital training platform (www.fieldtoschool.eu) aims to provide support for educators to acquire new skills and competences, using the theme of food to help tackle social and diversity issues; entrepreneurship education; environmental thinking and practical opportunities for disadvantaged learners. In turn, these activities will help provide softer outcomes of increased personal development and employability of educators and their pupils, and contribute to the celebration of European cultural heritage. The training gained will provide new skills to education and training professionals in both formal as well as informal educational settings.

The project aimed to:
– investigate the best practice Field to School examples that partner organisations are involved with
– develop case study information and films to demonstrate the activities to others
– share the background information required for running these farm links projects through the web-based training platform
– provide open source educational resources on e-twinning and or the SEG
– disseminate and promote the project in the partner countries and more widely

Number and type of Participants
The partnerships consists of eight partners from seven countries – Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. The partners are institutions with experiences and competences in different areas of school and farm education and a core group of staff with relevant experience were involved in meetings and developing the materials . A total of 21 different participants from the partners and eight participants from other organisations were involved in the transnational meetings. Over 3200 participants were involved in the wider engagement and dissemination work of the project.

The project delivered the following activities:

Didactic guidelines
The benefits of Field to School activities and outline to the project e-learning portal were prepared for the guidelines section of the website, with links to all the partner organisations.

Transnational meetings
Regular Transnational meetings were held throughout the project in the partner countries involved, providing an opportunity to plan and update on progress. Each meeting also included a best practice visit so that meeting participants could discover more about innovative approaches in each country.

Case studies
We investigated and showcased examples of best practice in partner countries where the farm visit connection is maintained with the school. Our case study section comprises 28 written, photographic and filmed project examples to provide the inspirational training content on the Field to School portal.

Resources
To help enable teachers to run projects in their own schools, over 50 resource sheets and films were created on the following topic areas:
Enterprise; Farming; Growing; Food; Social and Digital project ideas.

Field to School portal
All the resources are on the freely accessible fieldtoschool.eu website and adapted and translated where required for use in all seven partner countries. The Project website has been uploaded to the Project Results Platform suggested content for School Education Gateway October 2020 topic of Project Based Learning.

Dissemination
The partners were involved in dissemination of the work of the Field to School programme throughout the duration of the project. This included information on websites, engagement with colleagues, presentations at events and conferences, promotion to other Erasmus projects, discussions with stakeholders and social media/press contact. These are reported further in the report, together with Multiplier Events that were hosted for key stakeholders.

Results and Impact
The partners have been able to learn from each other and embed the resources into their own programmes in each country, drawing on the resources for their physical and online training delivery.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 292072,46 Eur

Project Coordinator

THE SOIL ASSOCIATION LIMITED & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Equalita, Institut für Qualifizierung und Vernetzung in Europa e.V.
• Skutecne zdrava skola, z.s.
• FUNDACJA IMIENIA STANISLAWA KARLOWSKIEGO
• Kaiblinger & Zehetgruber OG
• NORGES MILJO-OG BIOVITENSKAPLIGE UNIVERSITET
• KOBENHAVNS PROFESSIONSHOJSKOLE
• Ökomarkt e.V.