Scie-Citizens – Evaluating Bridges between science, education and society
ERASMUS+
KA2 – Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices
KA204 – Strategic Partnerships for adult education
Project no 2017-1-DE02-KA204-004125
Implementation period: 01.09.2017 – 30.09.2019
Partners:
Comparative Research Network e.V. – CRN (Germany) – coordinator
Centrul de Resurse și Consultanță în Educație – CRCE (Romania)
ELLINOGERMANIKI AGOGI SCHOLI PANAGEA SAVVA AE – EA (Greece)
School Raising – SR (Italy)
SPOLECZNA AKADEMIA NAUK – SAN (Poland)
CHANGEMAKER AB (Sweden)
Maria Konopnicka Public Library in Suwalki (Poland)
Project website: Scie-citizens
Facebook page: Scie-Citizens
EBook: Scie Citizens collected educational practices to bridge the gap between science and society
Scie-Citizens is an Erasmus+ two-year project that aims to remove boundaries within the educational sector and to enable open, new methods for lifelong learning. The mission of Scie-Citizens is to promote civil science through knowledge sharing, cooperation and capacity building.
The mission of Scie-Citizens is to promote civil science through knowledge sharing, cooperation and capacity building.
Scie-Citizens believes in the power of participation in education. The partnership was built upon realizing that the role of facts become again more and more relevant for every citizen. The partners are aware that in lifelong learning the “academic ivory tower” seems to be the ultimate bastion, resisting to be involved with other learning paths. However, the approach of Citizens Science is an innovative methodology, involving both top-down but as well from grass-roots level learners and citizens to be involved in research and science. We believe that instead of reinventing methods, it will be more productive to evaluate existing tools, identify smart practices, collect, review and share them. Thus, Scie-Citizens consists of partners from different education sectors, covering the geographic scope of all of Europe.
The mission of Scie-Citizens is to advance citizen science through knowledge sharing, collaboration, capacity building, and advocacy. The project aims to encourage broad and meaningful participation in civil science by promoting inclusivity and cooperation, and by facilitating a society that is open to sharing best practices, knowledge and tools in order to gain recognition of the value and impact of civil science.
The project seeks to create an assessment tool for identifying smart practices using citizen science approaches and collect those practices in a method handbook. The handbook will be a tool-box for trainers, teacher and other facilitators to create innovative and tested instructions all over Europe and across all educational sectors.
During 7 project meetings, we will work on 70 good practice examples, and 7 policy briefs, which will be published in a comprehensive project eBook. All methods will be documented, collected and published at the end of the project. In order to identify smart practices, the partnership will collect indicators and create an assessment tool. The tool and the method handbook will be open accessible and will be used by institutions from all education sectors informal and non-formal learning. The project can be understood as a pre-assessment of the needs to create and test European curricula in citizenship building.
The project targets directly trainer and teacher in all educational sectors. We expect the participants of the project to extend their knowledge on using citizens science methods in their curricula. We expect participants organizations to professionalize and innovate their curricula through new methods. We expect learners to become more motivated to perform lifelong learning and we expect stakeholders to become more aware of the need to include participatory methods in teaching and training.
As declared in the Digital Market Strategy, European citizens need innovative approaches to keep up-to-date in the ever-changing work market. A key 21st competence is the so-called Information Literacy, the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand. This became even more relevant lately, in the time of scepticism towards science and the wake of misinformation and so-called “Fake News”. The European Commission is tackling the spread of false information through its code of conduct to combat illegal online hate speech. The problem is rather tackled through self-regulation of the social media outlets. However, a more securing way to fit counter information is to engage and enable citizens to fact check and getting involved in both addressing and researching publicly perceived problems and deficits. A conduct on citizen science will help to inform the public and empower the European Citizens to assess information received.
Through partnerships, and experience and knowledge exchange, the project will contribute to an inclusive education, embedded in lifelong learning in order to increase the opportunities for all people within the educational sector to be involved in science and research.
Project meetings:
The second meeting was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 22-23.03.2018. For meeting report click here. For photos click here.
The third meeting was held in Athens, Greece, 10-13.06.2018. For photos click here.
The fourth meeting was held in Suwalki, Poland, 10-14.09.2018. For photos click here.