STEM education and Practices are Not Only about the cONtent Erasmus Project

Project Title

STEM education and Practices are Not Only about the cONtent

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: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Research and innovation; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development)

Project Summary

Both within scientific literature and on the work floor of educational institutions, education is often evaluated in terms of learning outcome, mostly interpreted as an increase in content knowledge. In the case of STEM teaching, the effectiveness of the teaching process is then judged in terms of the content learning outcome.
Within this consortium we feel that the focus on content knowledge transfer, while very important, should not be the only variable to be taken into account. So we asked ourselves the question: what are innate values of the teaching process apart from actual knowledge transfer? And how can these sometimes elusive factors be made quantitative and measurable?
We hypothesize that the way knowledge is acquired and transferred can have a major impact on students – apart from the actual subject knowledge being acquired. We refer to, e.g., Inquiry Based Learning (IBL), instilling in students the true spirit of discovery: hypothesizing, observing, experimenting, failing, succeeding, and critical thinking. But we also consider group processes and emotions (such as thrill, excitement, or boredom) accompanying the learning process as major factor. What do these factors demand from a new generation of STEM teachers? What does this imply for the nature of teacher education?
The partners of this European consortium are experts in the field of innovative teacher training. We believe that sharing our experiences in this field will enable us to get a grasp on the above questions and define ground-breaking research.

The program therefore will organize 4 events (international meetings) per year over a period of three years. Examples of these events are:
” Interdisciplinary School in France
” Boswell Beta Physics teachers conference in Netherlands
” Science fair in Bilbao
” Summer Science Factory in Croatia
” Final Dissemination Event in Bidart (France)
Objectives
Mobilize European STEM teachers, facilitating them in the exchange of their good practices and the identification of common factors, making them knowledgeable in the field of IBL

Create a network of “sharers”, centers of excellence that disseminate these good practices. The “sharers” will label, name, list, organize, apply, evaluate, analyze and synthesize the created content, contextualizing them for their audience of European teachers and teacher trainers. SPOON will disseminate the practices using an open license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International – CC BY-NC 4.0) and an a free and open-source content management system (WordPress or similar) with photo and video input (embedded Flickr and Youtube files). Website visits will be monitored by software (Google analytics).

Improve the awareness of scientific literacy by exchanging best practices in promoting scientific literacy in the classroom and within teacher training programs.

Increase reflexivity and critical thinking within teachers by facilitating contact with trainers and peers.

Assess the impact of these innovative practices in STEM education from the perspective of both teachers and other actors involved (e.g. researchers, trainers…).

Translate recommendations from scientific literature into classroom materials shared among teachers in workshops.

These meetings and evaluations lead to an assessment report and an online white book with recommendations, tools and innovative ideas about STEM education.

Impact:

For teachers : (using concrete and shared tools)

Improve the way STEM teachers are trained, including working with IBL.
Improving confidence when teaching STEM by non-traditional methods teaching
Increase the pleasure in STEM teaching
Increase creativity in STEM teaching situations and investigations
Improving their knowledge in science methods, history and instruments
Improve their communication and collaboration skills to make them being able to work with researchers
Improve their critical thinking and reflectivity on the scientific and research practice

Project Website

https://spoonobook.hypotheses.org

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 159409 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITE DE STRASBOURG & Country: FR

Project Partners

• FUNDACIO PER A LA UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA
• ELHUYAR FUNDAZIOA
• Tvornica Znanosti
• Boswell-Bèta (Zelide)