The first action, led by the University of Helsinki concerns the development, implementation and revision of innovative teaching activities and materials aimed to develop inter-multi-transdisciplinary, linguistic/argumentative, imaginative thinking and future-scaffolding skills, to impact young people's engagement with future-oriented and science-related activities. The elaboration of the research-based “Model for science education for the society of acceleration and uncertainty” will have the form of guidelines articulated in three main sections:
(a) a theoretical and pedagogical framework of the approach to science education;
(b) list of design and implementation principles aimed to operationalize the theoretical and pedagogical approaches into practical recommendations;
(c) case studies or examples taken from the implementations. The Model will be progressively fleshed out during the two rounds of implementation.
The work delivery is organized along three main stages, in accordance with the iterative nature of Design-Based Research methodology: materials’ design, first-round implementation, phenomenological analysis of the outcomes, re-design, second-round implementation and, again, fine-grained analysis of the outcomes.
Since September 2021, three Open Schooling networks have been created by FEDORA partners: the first official Helsinki Open Schooling Network (HOSN), the Oxford OS Network and the Italian Open Schooling Network.
The HOSN gathers 12 experts from different fields and backgrounds. Alongside the Helsinki FEDORA team, it includes policymakers, researchers, university educators, teachers and one principal. The invitation was to reflect on the newest FEDORA materials on the ‘three blind spots’. Currently, they are working on an upper-secondary science course module centred on the topic of carbon neutrality and the city of the future, which is an idea born during the first meeting. The module will include experts coaching students to make sense of the complexity of topics like sustainability, energy transitions, urban planning and science-technology-society interactions. It will utilise future-oriented pedagogies developed within the I SEE project. As befits the complexity of the topic of the course, the process of its development has been nonlinear, with the diverse composition of the HOSN providing an environment for collaborative creativity. You can read more about this network here.
On November 16th, the Italian partners organised the first meeting for the creation of their local open schooling network, bringing together people from very different backgrounds, skills and visions. 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”. Read more about what happened during this meeting here.
These three new networks enrich the ongoing growth of open schooling, which started for us with the implemented model of OSN developed in the SEAS project and is coherent with the model of the three spheres of change of K. O'Brian and Sygna.
As a project, we recently attended an open workshop organised by the Open Schooling Together, or OS Together, an informal but active collective of EU-funded projects that explore, research and practice Openschooling via different approaches. The collective gathers bi-monthly and is supported by a series of ongoing projects such as Makeitopen, Salls, Phereclos and Connect.
In our Resources section, we are showcasing some of the tools and methodologies created by these communities and we are certainly joining OSTogether, to make the most of the synergies that occur when different approaches converge.
