Italian open schooling network just begun its journey!

What’s an “open school”? What does it mean to open the school system to the world and vice versa what does it mean to bring the world into schools? What it needs to be “opened”? Buildings, activities, people, disciplines, schedules, programs?

On November the 16^th FEDORA invited people with very different backgrounds, skills and visions to take a break from the world frenzy and get together in order to reflect on those questions and get inspired by each other personal experiences.

As defined by the EU, Open schooling aims to support a range of activities based on collaboration between formal, non-formal and informal science education providers. This is why didactics researchers, teachers, philosophers, mathematicians, science communicators, videomakers, language experts, bloggers and other professionals joined online at FEDORA’s "Italian Open schooling Kick-off meeting” with the purpose of forming a network that will work together to design and implement “open schooling” activities and projects. These will fit with FEDORA’s main themes: interdisciplinarity, future and new languages.

The European project SEAS - Science Education for Action and Engagement towards Sustainability, from which FEDORA inherit some learnings and frameworks, identified among “open schooling” characteristics the willingness to make schools centres a model for a new idea of society and vehicles of social promotion and innovation. FEDORA, like SEAS, believes that schools should be a vehicle for change. But which kind of change? Participants reflected on four different levels [O’Brien and Sygna, 2013]: practical, institutional, epistemological and personal.

Three different projects (in progress or just finished) are the result of a reflection of this kind:

• Mockumentary for Climate Change is a master thesis project that explores the use of the filmmaking genre called “mockumentary” as a new linguistic and artistic tool for science education to engage young students in exploring Climate Change issues.
• Clouds physics and creative writing is a high school project that encourages students in creating a written narrative about complexity, setting stories in complex contexts such as a cloudy sky, an anthill or a flock.
• Quantum atelier is a high school project on quantum computing that aims at stimulating student’s imagination to create new form of artistic representation of the knowledge that they acquired.

But that was just the beginning! Between January and May, specific meetings for schools wishing to deepen tools already implemented and other meetings for the exploration of new activities will take place.

The network will meet again to share their experiences on FEDORA’s second open schooling meeting that will be held on June. Stay tuned!