Final Conference

The aim of the workshop is to explore and experience different participatory methods to enrich the stages of the SSIBL pedagogy: Ask – Find Out – Act. In this workshop we’ll dive a little bit deeper into the different SSIBL stages and get to know different methods used during the COSMOS implementation in Flandres. On the one hand, we’ll show some applications within the COSMOS project. On the other hand, during the workshop you’ll experience some of the methods yourself. At the end of the workshop, you’ll go home inspired with several ready-to-use methods for your own teaching practice.

Socioscientific inquiry-based learning supports learners’ engagement with controversial issues that have a basis in science but an impact on, and implications for society. In this workshop, using the socioscientific issue of vaping by young people as a context, we will present and engage participants in activities such as controversy mapping, that can support students raise personally relevant questions that they can then investigate in their science lessons. We will also share strategies for empowering students to take action. We will draw on, and share our experience of using these activities with 12-13 year old students in a secondary school in England.

COSMOS leverages the promise of open schooling to steer education towards more open modes of education. Students are hypothesized to gain an increased understanding of the relevance of science and grow their willingness to act as responsible citizens. The professional development process of teachers who design, implement and evaluate open schooling projects in communities of practice can drive the development of their science teacher identity. Bringing open schooling into practice can contribute to schools moving from more inward to more outward modes concerning organisation, pedagogy and community relations.

This workshop gives insight into how the COSMOS project evaluated outcomes at the student, teacher and school level. We delve into the evaluative framework, relate key concepts to their operationalisation, discuss how data collection was organised, and visit analyses. This includes pre-post surveys, individual interviews and group discussions. Workshop participants will get access to evaluation manuals as well as explore key outcomes in terms of learning by students, teachers and schools resulting from their participation in COSMOS.

You will walk away with a clear understanding of the strengths and challenges of the COSMOS evaluation framework and get inspiration on how it might apply to your own research or evaluation activities concerning open schooling.

The definition of the actors involved in/impacted by the community is an important step to co-create decision-making processes that fit best the community. These actors, or ‘stakeholders’, are people or organizations that have an interest in, or are affected by, the management and results of a project. In this sense, there are strategies to identify and balance the needs and interests of stakeholders in the community of practice. Therefore, in this workshop, participants will learn how to identify, approach and communicate with stakeholders, in order to build sustainable connections.

This roundtable session centres on the teachers' perspectives. The session is about providing the teachers and other educators who took part in the COSMOS project an opportunity to share with peers their reflections and insights on how their participation influenced them. In its first part, the teachers will briefly share the COSMOS implementation in their school with emphasis on the integration between professional development and co-design of a learning unit. After breaking the ice, we will conduct a discussion in which the participants reflect on how their participation influenced their perceptions and practices in different aspects, such as, learning in and as a community, the benefits and challenges of teaching science via SSIBL pedagogy conducted as a community-of-practice, and how they perceive open schooling as a broader educational approach.

We envision that participants will take away from this reflective discussion insights concerning the educational significance of OS in SE (and as a broad pedagogical approach), as well as some practical insights regarding opportunities and challenges based on the first-hand experience of the practitioners themselves.

This hybrid session is the only session in the conference that offers an opportunity for teachers not physically present in the conference to participate in the culminating international dialogue around COSMOS.

The current environmental challenges require collaboration between policymakers, industry, and citizens. This collaboration asks for ways to understand various perspectives and interests concerning issues related to, for instance, an energy transition and reducing waste, biodiversity loss, or public health issues. In the three open schooling projects, MULTIPLIERS, PAFSE, and MOST, we developed approaches to let students experience and learn how to collaborate with communities around their schools. In this workshop, we present our approaches, our findings, and lessons learned. We would like to discuss the potential of open schooling and its implications for schools, teachers, and students with the participants.

In this workshop, we will guide our participants through various applications of the school openness wheel from the COSMOS project. We will learn how to scale our own organisation on the different dimensions of the school openness wheel. Where is the organisations positioned on the different dimensions, more inward or more outward? And what do you do if there is a gap between your own wheel and the organisation wheel? Together we discover the overlap between the different dimensions: Which dimensions go together for you? Which could also conflict? Afterwards we’ll move to facilitators and barriers regarding the different dimensions. What can you do – regarding each dimension – to move outward and what are the possible threats?

Untapped potential, what value can working with societal partners add to education? Four societal partners who engaged throughout the course of the project share their perceptions and learnings from the journey.

This session will have a round table structure. Each partner will have an area where we storytell our experience of COSMOS. We tell our story for 6-7 minutes followed by an interactive reflection activity.

Participants can then move around so they can hear from us all in small groups. We all share our experiences but each will reflect with a different focus, e.g. secondary, primary, topics based, school leadership involvement etc.

Explore what different external partners can mean to you, which added value they can offer when addressing socio-scientific issues in the classroom.

Proposed schedule

13.45 Introduction of partners and round table set up
14.00 Round 1
14.10 Round 2
14.20 Round 3
14.40 Round 4
14.45 – 15.00 Closure/group discussion