About the project
This project will result in guidelines for European schools in handling difficult topics for the years to come.
The project departs from the recognition of «wicked problems». Wicked problems are complex societal issues with no obvious or simple solutions. Today, they are found in school curricula but also as issues communities, families and young people define as important for their lives today and for their possible futures.
In creating a roadmap for social change, two basic perspectives are key:
- First, we seek to explore ‘transformative agency’ among young students. This means how they use their knowledge, skills, and resilience to make choices and handle possible future pathways for themselves and other young people, locally and globally.
- Second, we seek to understand how practices developed to engage students can contribute to teaching and learning about ‘wicked problems’ and ‘large topics’.
Objectives
The main objective is to design a sustainable collaborative European roadmap and practices between schools, universities and communities to better deal with contemporary issues of social change.
The project has five sub-objectives
- Design, implement and disseminate transformative educational projects. These projects will address contemporary social issues of global importance, and connect secondary schools with communities, with the support of universities.
- Develop a model of how teachers, students, communities and universities together can create school activities that address “wicked problems”, and that provide the students with tools to influence their own future.
- Promote authentic learning in secondary schools about contemporary social and environmental issues. This learning is important to the role of schools and education in contemporary societies, as well as to how we deal with future challenges.
- Explore how digital resources can support the content development and the process of transformative agency across schools, universities and communities, and among teachers and students.
- Disseminate results and the impact of projects and activities as a model for others of how to transform and socially involve students and their communities. We will make a documentary as part of this dissemination.
Background
European societies and citizens are experiencing dramatic and overwhelming challenges to the ways we live our lives, linked to such areas as armed conflicts, threats of environmental disasters, pandemics, economic instability, digitalization, migration and globalization.
Social change has become part of several national curricula for schools, as transversal topics that teachers and students should work on, across subject domains. Participating in social change is also understood as key competence for European futures.
Schools are important for coping with social change. However, it is less clear how schools, teachers and students should address these developments and topics, and how schools can re-position themselves in our societies to deal with future challenges, as suggested by the International Commission on the Futures of Education (UNESCO, 2021). The role of research as part of these developments has also been unclear.
We need to explore how collaborative co-construction between schools, communities, and academia unfolds, and we are concerned about how young people and their communities today experience social change and their own transformative agency.
The digital is both a resource and a challenge for transformation, and it needs to be documented in young people’s everyday practices and as part of activities in schools.
