Early Innovation Capacity Fostering innovation interest and building innovation capacity among secondary school students through opening up new learning spaces for young learners Erasmus Project

Project Title

Early Innovation Capacity

Fostering innovation interest and building innovation capacity among secondary school students through opening up new learning spaces for young learners

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 2017

Project Topics

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

Project Summary

iCAP is one of the first practice-oriented projects in the EU responding to the Commission’s invitation to establish experimentation with the creation of innovation interest, skills and capacity in primary and secondary school, and it also contributes to a new generation of Erasmus responding to the increasing EU interest in entrepreneurship and innovation based schooling. The consortium was made up of 2 knowledge partners with expertise in innovative didactics, including entrepreneurial and innovation oriented learning, 5 practice partners (secondary schools) from different countries and a quality and exploitation partner.

iCAP was missioned to design, deliver and share experimentation with learning activities and formats that create innovation interest and capacity among students, based on transnational virtual collaboration and on addressing societal challenges presented by local entrepreneurs, innovators and pioneers in the participating communities.

The project provided students the opportunity to engage in missions, from research to small local NGO initiatives both internally at their schools and within their own communities, to contribute and co-create innovative solutions to societal problems. This represented a powerful open schooling approach, establishing local partnerships with the community and offering real-life/time challenges to the students as encouraged by the Commission.

The project was facilitated rather than led by the coordinating partner. There was a high degree of distributed leadership particularly in light of the project ethos, which was to empower students as far as possible. Indeed the project was unusual in the way that the implementation of actual change-focused work on the ground was led entirely by the students themselves. Each transnational meeting featured reporting back by student teams and exercises in listening to the students and teachers in order to work out the rules of what had been done rather than imposing a rigid template on project activity. The nature of the project also challenged teachers in their traditional roles as leaders of student learning.

All of the activities worked through real-life local societal challenges and worked in close collaboration with small eco-systems of community resources. The activities and processes were worked, shared and discussed with the students as they were the centre, the co-drivers and co-creators of the planning, activities and results of the project.

Key outcomes:

Output 1: Virtual Resource Centre
This takes the form of an open website: http://icap-action.com that was built up over the duration of the project. This is where the experiences of the participating schools are shared and where the other outputs can be accessed. The Resource Centre is designed to help visitors understand what we did, how we did it and, most importantly, to inspire them to have a go at running innovation projects in their own settings.

Output 2: Guidelines document for implementing innovation capacity projects
This was developed in the second part of the project. It was organised by our Greek Knowledge partner, University of Thessaly, with contributions from all other partners. The document provides an account of the project experience, a ‘how to’ guide, a discussion of the impact of the project on the students and a bank of useful resources linked to the theme of innovation and capacity building. A summary of the document in all five project languages is available on the Resource Centre.

Output 3: Video documenting student experience
There are in fact six videos available via the Resource Centre. Firstly, the 20-minute project video offers a full account of the project approach; a second ‘motivational video’ provides a summary version of this and there are four versions of interviews with students each with different subtitles reflecting the project languages.

Output 4: Policy Paper
This was compiled by our quality assurance partner, Working with Europe, based on inputs from participants throughout the project and chiefly at the final Mobility event. Again, the whole document and a summary of this is available on the Resource Centre.

Output 5: Research and experimentation
The whole iCAP project has been a vast practical experiment. The impact of carrying out these projects on young people and on teachers is explored in the project research conducted by the knowledge partner, University of Gloucestershire with the active participation of all the students and teachers involved in the project. The research report is available via the Resource Centre and is being written up and submitted to a peer reviewed journal for publication.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 253165 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE LBG & Country: UK

Project Partners

• PLATON M.E.P.E
• SOLSKI CENTER KRANJ
• FURNESS ACADEMIES TRUST
• Institut de Vilafant
• Working with Europe/Treballant amb Europa Associació
• Scoala Gimnaziala Gheorghe Titeica
• PANEPISTIMIO THESSALIAS