iYouthEmpowering Europe’s Young Innovators – the desire to innovate Erasmus Project

Project Title

iYouthEmpowering Europe’s Young Innovators – the desire to innovate

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 2016

Project Topics

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

Project Summary

The iYouth project responded to continued calls from such global institutions as the European Commission and the OECD to re-think education and to help equip the new generations of students with the skills and competences they need in their new globalized world. Thus iYouth formed and forms part of the Commission’s “re-thinking education agenda”. Among the highest priorities in this agenda are the development of entrepreneurial competences and innovation competences. The iYouth project was missioned to explore how schools and teachers can create innovation interest and capacity among 12-16 years old secondary school students – in close collaboration with community/societal resources and through offering the student teams real-life missions to accomplish.
It was clear from the beginning that such innovation interest and capacity cannot be taught traditionally in the classroom. This means that creating entrepreneurial, innovation and other important 21st century skills among secondary school students call for a dramatically new organization of learning: it is not simply about adding new content to the curricula, but about the dramatic fact that these important 21st century skills simply cannot be acquired within traditional academic didactics.
The iYouth project was aware of this from the very beginning, therefore creating such activity forms as real-life and real-time engagement in innovation processes in the community. However, during the project this approach was refined and further developed into an authentic open schooling approach, more systematically describing and exploring the key features of the open schooling methodology: the innovation activities are organized as community missions, no teaching takes place and learning happens when needed and relevant, all activities are community relevant and take place in close interaction with community/societal innovation resources – and all activities address important challenges in real-life and in real-time. The most important element in this open schooling approach is agency: the innovation interest and the innovation capacity can only be developed through taking action in the real world. It is precisely through the students’ agency that they build interest, capacity and competences.
The outcomes of the project are based on such experimentation in 5 secondary schools from across Europe, involving almost 100 secondary school students engaging in a number of community driven, student driven or project driven innovation projects, relevant to the community and producing new resources in the community. The outcomes can be accessed here: http://iyouths.eu/
The students’ innovation activities at the same time revealed a more or less anticipated challenge: it is very difficult for many schools to practice new forms of education and learning, as schools and teachers are tremendously restricted by increasingly rigid and inflexible curricula, not at all supporting the implementation of the Commission visions. Schools, teachers and students will need to struggle with such “against all odds” realities in their attempt to respond to and support the educational visions of the European Commission and leading educational research. The project’s policy and research recommendations papers address those challenges and point to ways to face the obstacles. The iYouth project will form part of the European practical experimentation bank on which highly needed educational innovation will build in the future. What was not expected and what goes beyond what was foreseen in the application is the fact that the iYouth project will feed into what now has become a long-term plan towards European leadership.
The iYouth project has accomplished this mission in the form of providing rich guidance material openly available from the project website. The guidance is based on practical experience, not on educational theory, and is therefore considered most useful to dedicated schools and teachers. Key partners used the iYouth and similar project platforms to design a long-term sustainability strategy entitled “Unteachables but Learnables”.
This long-term mission will address the fact that traditional academic teaching is becoming increasingly irrelevant to 21st century youth, and that it needs to be urgently replaced by totally different open schooling, project based and mission based learning processes, empowering the young students’ agency.
The “Unteachables but Learnables” platform includes several new 2019 and 2020 Erasmus+ initiatives, exploring various aspects of how to empower young students’ agency. A higher level European initiative is foreseen as a result of this experimentation – resulting in, within a 5 year period, a European leadership in the fields addressed. What was not expected and what goes beyond what was foreseen in the application is the fact that the iYouth project will feed into what now has become a long-term plan towards European leadership.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 208452 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITATEA STEFAN CEL MARE DIN SUCEAVA & Country: RO

Project Partners

• Scoala Gimnaziala Gheorghe Titeica
• Szczecinska Szkola Wyzsza Collegium Balticum
• Istituto Comprensivo 1 Vasto
• PLATON M.E.P.E
• Working with Europe/Treballant amb Europa Associació
• Institut de Vilafant
• KONTIKI-SZAKKEPZO SZERVEZESI NONPROFIT KIEMELKEDOEN KOZHASZNU ZARTKORUEN MUKODO RT