Idea & Work Plan
National ID: 2019-1-DK01-KA201-060167
EC Project Number: KA201-2019-002
1.10.2019 - 31.03.2022
DETAILED WORK PROGRAMME
What are the reasons for the specific construction of the project’s work programme?
The "Young students as critical science detectives" project will create its results through combining:
- the European Commission’s and recent science learning research’ open science schooling guidance
- practical experience with the project methodology created through 10 student teams’ science detective missions along a period of in total 12 months, including the knowledge creation based on this practice.
This combination is expected to guarantee valid and useful outcomes to share with interested school and science teachers from across Europe.
THE PROGRESSION LOGIC IN BRIEF
This combination leads to the following project progression logic:
The project’s practice partners, schools and student teams will initially be guided by project guidance based on the state of the art open science schooling platform and on concrete experience from several open science schooling Erasmus+ projects.
Supported by this guidance the student teams will engage in the first long period of critical science detecting and create valuable experience and story-telling from these science missions.
In the middle of the project the project will collectively evaluate the results of the first round of critical science missions and make new guidance available to the student teams, this time also based on the evaluation of the practical experience from the first round science missions. This evaluation period will include a learning mobility for the participating 50 students and their science teachers.
Supported by the new guidance material the student teams will engage in the second long period of critical science detecting and missions. The project’s knowledge partners will create knowledge elements and building bricks from the student teams’ documentation and story-telling.
IDEA
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.
Above all there is a need to involve citizens, young and old, as active agents at the heart of inquiry-oriented science learning – in identifying and framing the research problems and leading to the discovery of solutions and innovations which help situate science in every-day life. In this way, we involve a richer pool of talent in framing a more responsible and ethical approach to research and innovation.
Science education in schools is urgently in need of fundamental change to be attractive to 21st century young students.
The European Commission calls for educational players to develop open science schooling to innovate traditional science teaching.
However, experience shows that it is very difficult for secondary schools to develop open science schooling due to tight and overloaded curricula.
Open science schooling is very demanding and few secondary schools can manage.
Therefore we need realistic and still attractive innovative science models in secondary school, still based on the open schooling approach, but easy to integrate in the everyday life of the schools.
YOUNG STUDENTS AS CRITICAL SCIENCE DETECTIVES offers such a model.
The idea to create the YOUNG STUDENTS AS CRITICAL SCIENCE DETECTIVES emerged from a number of Erasmus+ experimentations with open schooling and open science schooling.
The lessons learned from this rich experimentation revealed that it is difficult, sometimes impossible, for secondary schools in Europe to implement and experiment with the full concept and methodology of what we understand as “open science schooling”.
The challenge for many schools and science teachers are: when trying to implement the full open science schooling methodology, they experienced – not surprisingly – that the traditional school and science curricula made it almost impossible.
Students and teachers were not provided with the necessary time and space for such experimentation.
Even worse, many governments across Europe are now overcrowding the curricula, in particular the science curricula, with new topics, with technology and with more testing. Some governments are even putting more students in the classes.
Faced with these conditions in the Erasmus+ projects, many schools working with open science schooling limited the experimentation to more punctual out-of-school activities such as visit to science centers – or including technology to “modernize” the science teaching.
However positive such activities might be to students with less interest in traditional science teaching, such punctual activity is very far from what is intended in the open science schooling methodology.
The open science schooling methodology is about student teams’ long and immersive and full engagement in science activities and processes in the community – and this is quite demanding.
Therefore a group of partners started creating the idea of open science schooling approaches that were more practically implementable for schools and science teachers in typical secondary schools.
In other words: open science schooling that could be INTEGRATED in the normal science education or ADDED to normal science education without the need to change the curricula fundamentally – and sufficiently flexible to be implemented in different ways according to the schools’ capacity and resources.
As a result of renewed studies of the most important Commission science education innovation guidelines and recent critical science learning research, we recognized that one of the major components in science learning innovation was: to be attractive to 21st century students, science and science learning should recover and rediscover the links to NARRATIVE and make efforts to communicate the learning in narrative forms.
These links to narrative forms includes for example: adventure, science fiction, exploration, detective work, curiosity – and the ability to take action in such narrative worlds: narrative and epic agency.
Therefore the idea became to create an open science schooling methodology that was based on the narrative form of classic detectives, appeared attractive and interesting to the young students – and was implementable at different levels and in different ways.
The result was the YOUNG STUDENTS AS CRITICAL SCIENCE DETECTIVES concept, at the same time able to integrate (due to the term “critical”) important Commission science learning policies, such as “science with and for society” and “responsible science”, but also to integrate sharing the science engagement with the students’ families and with other citizens.
The ultimate mission of the project is therefore to create a model of YOUNG STUDENTS AS CRITICAL SCIENCE DETECTIVES that is attractive to schools and science teachers from across Europe and appears realistic to engage in.
The model will therefore be co-created by the young students themselves, as this is credo for all true educational innovation in the 21st century.
The project’s work methods will build knowledge elements from the documented student teams’ practice and ensure qualified transformation of this knowledge into the project’s final results.
This simple but efficient work method has been successfully tested in a long line of demanding Erasmus+ projects.
The project is coordinated by Danish ABSALON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE and the partnership includes 8 partners from 7 European countries.
The partnership is balanced between very strong knowledge partners and dedicated secondary school partners, and is completed by a Quality Assurance partner with more than 15 years in European collaboration.
The partnership is extremely pan-European with participation from Finland to Spain and from Greece to Denmark.
The project will produce a long line of process outcomes and the following major products:
THE CRITICAL SCIENCE DETECTIVES MODEL
A guidance collection for secondary schools and their science teachers on how to easily integrate the critical science detectives method in the science curricula
I AM A SCIENCE DETECTIVE – R U?
The student teams’ joint video movie explain how they changed their negative attitudes towards science through the critical science missions
CRITICAL SCIENCE DETECTIVES AND THE OPEN SCIENCE SCHOOLING AGENDA
A theoretical paper discussing state of the art of Open Science Schooling from the point of view of lessons learned in the Critical Science Detectives project
THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE LEARNING INNOVATION
A policy paper trying to identify the key challenges to science learning innovation, based on positive and negative experience from the Critical Science Detectives project; the policy paper wishes to identify key research and experimentation needs in the near future to make Open Science Schooling a reality
Comments
Post a Comment