Science organisations as Open Schooling initiators
Activity Building Level 0
Open Schooling is an approach in which purposeful collaborations between schools and their wider communities are built to address relevant local challenges, contribute to community development and promote an active global citizenship. Informal science education institutions play a major role in enhancing such enriching exchanges and turning schools into key community actors and students into change makers. This approach, developed and tested by a number of science centres and museums, has proven to have an impact not only on teachers and students but also on informal science engagement professionals and on their way to implement educational programmes.
In this workshop, we invite educators from science museums and non-formal learning spaces to explore Open Schooling with us. This is an opportunity for them to learn, get inspired and reflect together on the challenges and benefits of open schooling for their institutions.
During the workshop, participants will become familiar with the open schooling approach and the innovative tools developed by the EU-funded project Make it Open through the first-hand testimonies of pioneer teachers, science centres and museums practitioners. Case clinics will be key to exploring existing issues faced by professionals when implementing new educational programmes and engaging with teachers. By the end of the workshop, participants will have learnt skills and tools that will help them navigate their open schooling journey.
Outcomes: what will participants get from this session? Skills, knowledge, experience etc.
Participants will get familiar with the Open Schooling approach developed by Make it Open. They will learn what it means to set up an open educational programme and will be introduced to innovative resources like the Learning Scenarios and the Navigator - an online platform available in more than 10 languages that contains all learning material needed to transition to Open Schooling. Project partners will share their first-hand experience and guide participants through the obstacles, challenges and benefits of Open Schooling projects. At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to draft an action plan and bring back to their institutions a concrete set of actions.
The Make it Open project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.872106.
Session speakers
Science Communicator Manager
Lagos Ciência Viva Science Centre has been one of the hubs implementing the Make it Open developed tools to bring open schooling to the Algarve region in Portugal.
We are going to share with you the strategies we developed to implement a Hub and all the support we gave to teachers and schools when initiating their journey into open Schooling. Moreover, we will share the how, when and who we could involve to bring successful results and happy teachers on board.
Educator and Program Coordinator
The Navigator has proven to be a fantastic tool for making connections, and the themes are spot on. In the Swedish hub, we found that the scenarios often inspired new lesson ideas based on local opportunities. We worked with teachers to fit the learning scenarios to the curriculum, their planning, student interests and local society – a challenging but extremely rewarding journey. We look forward to sharing what we learned and collaborating with other science centers to take action.
Head of education and evaluation departments
We choose to present how we promoted the framework and tools of open schooling in a reality in which teachers are confined to the curriculum at one end and on the other range of the spectrum how we introduced the idea and tools to a school that iis not confined to the curriculum. The importance on one hand and difficulties of collaboration with the community- from identifying the relevant people or organisations to approaching them and then to host or visit them - all these stages are crucial in the implementation of open schooling. They may seem trivial to anyone that is not a teacher but are certainly barriers when time is scarce. We will show how we scaffolded these stages and discuss how to move from scaffolding to letting the teachers deal with this independently. How do we build a process that is doable.
Introduction of the Make it Open approach, where schools are transformed from traditional educational institutions into community partnerships and become agents of community well-being. Students, on their end, perceive themselves as change makers. We will present the process of implementation and dissemination in hubs and schools.
Senior specialist in Educational Solutions Departament
Copernicus Science Centre
Copernicus Science Center has participated in the work of the consortium during developing resources related to open schooling, and is also a leader of the national HUB which promotes the idea of OS in Poland. During the workshop we will share with the participants our experience in running the hub, we will talk about the activities we are preparing in our HUB for the participants of the project - both for beginner teachers and for very experienced ones.
