Dr. Eilish McLoughlin (CASTeL) and Dr James Lovatt (CASTeL) and Dr. Padraig Murphy (Lead PI – CELSIUS) have recently received funding through the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. They are partners and evaluation workpackage leaders in the Open Schools for Open Societies (OSOS) project which held it’s Kick Off meeting in Athens at the start of April.
The project is coordinated by Ellinogermaniki Agogi Scholi Panagea Savva (EA) and has 20 partner institutions. The project aims to describe and implement at scale a process that will facilitate the transformation of schools to innovative ecosystems, acting as shared sites of science learning for which leaders, teachers, students and the local community share responsibility, over which they share authority, and from which they all benefit through the increase of their communities’ science capital and the development of responsible citizenship.
The project supports a large number of European schools to implement Open Schooling approaches by a) developing a model that promote such a culture, b) offering guidelines and advice on issues such as staff development, redesigning time, and partnerships with relevant organisations (local industries, research organisations, parents associations and policy makers), and c) suggesting a range of possible implementation processes from small-scale prototypes through to setting up an “open school within a school” or even designing a new school while it is testing and assessing them in more than 1,000 school environments in 12 European countries. The themes of the project activities developed and pursuit in participating schools that will take place will focus on areas of science linked with the Grand Societal Challenges as shaped by the EC, will be related to RRI and will link with regional and local issues of interest.