Designing Collaborative Educational Resources (COERS) for Assets-Based Community Participation (ABCP) across Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Designing Collaborative Educational Resources (COERS) for Assets-Based Community Participation (ABCP) across Europe

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 higher 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; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)

Project Summary

Context/background of the project
Evidence suggests that relationships between young people living in socially deprived communities and other local residents are often fraught with mutual distrust and stereotyping. Building on the Strength-Based Approach used in social work, the principles associated with Assets-Based Community Development rely on empowerment of local residents and community groups while significantly adjusting the mind-sets of service providers to create an equilibrium of understanding and avoid a deficit view of young people and disadvantaged communities. The project aims to design collaborative open educational resources in the form of innovative inter-professional educational resources to enable professionals and practitioners to implement an assets-based approach to foster inter-agency and inter-generational connectivity. In turn, these approaches will nurture and mobilise existing community assets and encourage pioneering collaborative approaches towards enhancing local community participation in order to enable communities to flourish.

Objectives and Description of main activities
The first stage of the project developed a stakeholder led gap analysis that identifies the challenges faced by a range of professional groups and community agencies. Research was carried out across 10 community stakeholder groups through the lens of five different academic disciplinary perspectives investigating assets based practices in relation to these challenges. This process culminated in the co-production of comparative case studies from across northern, central and eastern Europe illustrating assets-based approaches to youth crime prevention, inclusion and inter-generational community participation from a range of professional perspectives. The second implementation phase of the project started by developing a learning and facilitation framework informed by case based pedagogy for online learning. This informed the development of the online collaborative learning environment. This was built using Moodle and hosted on the Openlearn create platform to facilitate open access to the resources which can be retrieved, reused, revised and retained. The higher education partners and community stakeholder groups developed and piloted a series of 5 Collaborative Open Educational resources in the form of short themed courses on Assets based approaches to Multi professional working. These OER are embedded in wider Masters level modules on ‘Multi professional working’ hosted at the University of the West of Scotland. In addition this process produced a pool of resources that can be used across geographical and socio-cultural contexts by professionals and community workers with a focus on assets based approaches to working with communities.

Participating organisations
To deliver the project ambition we have assembled a five country partnership from Higher Education comprising combined expertise in youth inclusion, crime prevention, policy analysis, civic and political participation, community psychology and community participation. Each partner has worked closely with community stakeholder organisations with focuses on youth work, community health, reducing youth crime, social work, community policing, housing officers, teachers and criminal justice.

Results and impact attained
Partner organisatons and stakeholders have actively engaged in the research and design process to develop educational resources that are locally relevant and can be recontextualised for other professional groups and community contexts drawing on a collaborative case based learning pedagogical method. In addition partners and stakeholders have developed their digital skills and methods for designing and engaging in open educational practices that bring together different types of knowledge across disciplines and educational contexts to generate new knowledge making processes and innovative practice.

Longer-term benefits
The project legacy includes the building blocks for a virtual community assets network, a European Academy and the foundations for the establishment of a fully accredited European Masters programme on Multi Professional working with communities. The project has developed innovative approaches to community engagement, has contributed to mobility and virtual mobility and equipped the workforce to lead reform and champion evidence–informed approaches to community enhancement through harnessing untapped talent within European Communities.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 251087 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF SCOTLAND & Country: UK

Project Partners

• UNIVERZA V MARIBORU
• LAUREA-AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY
• SYDDANSK UNIVERSITET
• ALMA MATER STUDIORUM – UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA