Family-based Open Science Schooling – capacity and guidance building in secondary schools for involving young students’ families in open science schooling activities to foster responsible science education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Family-based Open Science Schooling – capacity and guidance building in secondary schools for involving young students’ families in open science schooling activities to foster responsible science education

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

Encourage “open schooling” where schools, in cooperation with other stakeholders, become an agent of community well-being; FAMILIES ARE ENCOURAGED TO BECOME REAL PARTNERS IN SCHOOL LIFE AND ACTIVITIES; professionals from enterprise, civil and wider society are actively involved in bringing real-life projects into the classroom.
COMMISSION 2015, SCIENCE EDUCATION FOR RESPONSIBLE CITIZENSHIP

In 2015, the international community signed the Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 and set 17 bold goals to reach a better and equal society. The fourth goal was established to be Quality Education, aiming to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UNESCO, 2017). In our current society, in which digitalization and technologies transverse almost (if not all) dimensions of our everyday life, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths (STEAM) abilities and digital competences become key factors for students to reach a good life. This scenario calls for a change in the school education paradigm.

For this, there is a strong need to boost the interest in and retention of students in STEAM subjects. However, a recent trend shows young students in K12 developing resistance towards science learning and science careers. Moreover, global players such as the European Commission and the OECD as well as leading research communities agree that one of the biggest challenges to 21st century education is to engage and re-engage young student along their teenage years in science learning.

One powerful way to practice to (re)engage young students in science learning connected to society demands is to include FAMILIES AND COMMUNITY IN OPEN REAL-LIFE ACTIVITIES, engaging students and their families in science in the local and virtual communities. Families, especially parents, have a crucial role at influencing students’ engagement towards science learning.

Therefore there is a substantial need to bring in innovative educational practices in partnership of the supporting community surrounding school. Hence, this project has 3 main objectives: 1) Encouraging families to become real partners in school life and activities through participatory design; 2) Co-creating ’science everywhere’ activities alongside teachers, students and families to support responsible science education; 3) Supporting the deployment of immersive Joint Science Missions involving the community as a whole so that schools become agents of community well-being.

Our Family-based Open Science Schooling project is one of the first systematic European attempts to experiment with such challenges. The project’s most important mission is to develop practically useful guidance to secondary schools and science teachers on how to organize and facilitate family-based open science schooling with good quality, based on rich practical experimentation along the project and on co-creation with young students and their families.

All project elements are directed towards producing such practically useful and attractive guidance to secondary schools and science teachers through participatory design with schools and families. The success of such initiatives is totally depending on the quality of the capacity building and empowerment of science teachers, schools and the surrounding school communities.

Underpinning this basic innovation, the project’s work methods add considerable novelty to the initiatives, as the project organization, experimentation and results will involve students, teachers and families as co-creators, through well documented participatory design approach. The project innovation is therefore linked to the European re-thinking science education agenda, dedicated to find brand new ways to make science and science learning attractive to young students, precisely along the years in which they strongly build their identity, personality and professional intents.

The project consortium comprehends two highly qualified knowledge partners (of which one is the project coordinator), five dedicated practice partners (secondary schools) from different countries and one quality assurance partner, covering in total eight quite different European member states, ranging from Finland to Portugal and from Poland to Turkey.

From this project, it is expected that young students engage in real-life science in open collaborating community and family teams, creating dramatically new images of what applied science is and how it can be practiced among teenagers. At the same time this open schooling environment will provide a reliable context for building responsible science mindsets towards active citizenship.

The project will yield 4 product outcomes expressed through four Intellectual Outputs (IOs), and process outcomes will result from the various project phases.
 

Project Website

https://sites.uef.fi/familybasedoss/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 268883 Eur

Project Coordinator

ITA-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO & Country: FI

Project Partners

• Szkola Podstawowa nr 2 z Oddzialami Dwujezycznymi im ks Stanislawa Konarskiego
• ELAZIG DOGA ANADOLU LISESI
• Gimnaziya s prepodavane na chuzhdi ezici “Romen Rolan”
• Platon M.E.P.E.
• Working with Europe/Treballant amb Europa Associació
• COFAC COOPERATIVA DE FORMACAO E ANIMACAO CULTURAL CRL
• Pasvalio Levens pagrindine mokykla