Open Science Schooling is finding real science in the community through students’ involvement into local practical activities outside school and bringing the acquired knowledge back to school. Through this, students get a better understanding of how science is applied in real life.
Open Science Schooling (OSS) has been almost exclusively a theory, a concept used in research and policy-making. This makes it very difficult for secondary schools and science teachers across Europe to engage in practical experimentation with Open Science Schooling. The OSS project is one of the first systematic contributions in Europe to the development of resources based on practical experience implementing open science schooling.
The project evidently engages teachers, students and schools, but based on state of the art research the project focuses on the participation and co-creation of the students, as innovation in science learning can be expected to be and needs to be driven primarily from students, not from science teachers. As leading EU researchers say: “Why don’t you start asking the students”?
The mission of the project is to develop and produce open science schooling guidelines through practical experimentation and through the co-creation of secondary school students (see the project Intellectual Outputs).
The Open Science Schooling objectives
Understanding
Integration
Open Practice
Evaluation
and documentation
Eco-systems
What is Open Science Schooling?
The Open Science Schooling project will implement the project agenda through in 5 didactic challenges: Understanding, Integration, Open Practice, Evaluation & documentation and Eco-systems. These 5 challenges will at the same time define the project’s progression and development methodology and define the structure of the final guidelines. The 5 challenges endow the project with a single and integrated approach, making it easier for project partners, students and community collaborators to understand and implement the project.
Project periods
The OSS project builds its results on a radical co-creation methodology. Project has three major Periods (Blue-, Green- and Red period). The blue period aims to create consensus and readiness among partners, teachers and students and to mobilise the resources to collaborate with the project, locally and transnationally. the Green Period is the “juice” of the project; it will create the knowledge, experience and documentation on which the project outcomes will be based. The Red Period is the project’s final period will transform the produced raw material, including from the Open Science Schooling Co-creation Encounter, into high-quality useful outcomes. As such, OSS aims at:
- Engaging students in REAL-LIFE science challenges in the society
- Engaging schools and students in practical science collaboration with resources in the COMMUNITY, including research, science, innovation and social resources and stakeholders
- Offering students direct participation in epic, immersive and exciting MISSIONS
- Inviting CROSS-SUBJECT and cross-class approaches
- Offering students with different LEARNING STYLES a variety of practice oriented work forms very different from traditional theoretical and laboratory-based science teaching, benefiting a variety of types of learners
- Providing students with the opportunity and resources to develop a different IMAGE of what science is and what science could be for them, linking in much more narrative ways to the identity and personality of the young students
