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Welcome to the European Open Schooling Network

Inspire, Connect & find Support

Connecting the Open School Community

Inspire, Connect and find Support: This is the aim of the European Open Schooling Network (EOSnet), an association of participants or people interested in participating in Open Schooling projects.

But what exactly is Open Schooling?

“Open Schooling (is) where schools, in cooperation with other stakeholders, become an agent of community well-being: families are encouraged to become real partners in school life and activities; professionals from enterprise, civil and wider society are actively involved in bringing real-life projects into the classroom.”

Science Education for Responsible CitizenshipEuropean Commission

Let’s bring Open Schooling to life!

School-Community-Projects from all over Europe will inspire you. Connect with like-minded individuals and groups and discuss how co-creation processes can increase students’ desire to learn and their interest in science. Find support and benefit from resources and experiences: teaching materials, pedagogical guidelines and step-by-step instructions from European Open Schooling projects that make it easy to implement School-Community-Projects.

Open the doors of the classrooms now and join the EOSnet!

Join Now!

What Participants say about EOSNet

“While working on the project, I learned how important renewable energy is and how serious savings can actually be made through simple methods, and I will implement it for the rest of my life.”

Student Participant

“A school that thinks, that reflects, that learns along the way, that opens its doors to families and the community, is a living school that trains competent people adapted to a liquid society that is constantly evolving. At the same time, it adopts a role of service, generating positive changes for the community.”

Educational CommunityCEIP Gloria Fuertes, Jaén

“Educating young people is a joint project - not just of teachers and parents, but of all of us. 'Outsiders' bring new impulses and different ways of seeing and thinking to the school, which is why such projects are so important. They provide 'internships @ school,' so to speak, and most of us know from our own experience how important internships are.”

Mirco PriessChair of WEE Stiftung e.V. (NGO and Foundation)

“Seeing my students having ownership in their own sustainability project made me as a teacher feel proud! I could see them growing in brainstorm and planning skills, as well in assertiveness by reaching out to school and community members.”

Sanne KorteBiology teacher

“When I found out I was going into this project, I was so happy to encourage environmental awareness. So, we immediately started working with my friends and did the best we could. We're all going to sign this project together. And the future will be proud of us...”

Student Participant

Find Inspiration

Get to know Existing Open Schooling Communities

What is an Open Schooling Community?

In an Open Schooling Community a teacher and their students join forces with citizens – parents, neighbours, volunteers and professionals from local businesses, organisations or the community. Together they work on a project addressing an environmental issue affecting their community. We call them School-Community-Projects.

This involves working on eye level and incorporating the imagination, experience and knowledge of all participants. The jointly developed solutions are then presented to the public together. There are no limits to creativity and the choice of medium!

Open School Communities already exist in many places in Europe!

The Life of a School Community

In School-Community-Projects (SCP) a wide range of questions are explored such as: How did our waste behavior change during the corona pandemic? How can plastic waste be reduced? What effects does it have if we buy things second hand?

What all the projects have in common is that everyone has contributed their knowledge, their experience and their perspective – and in the end there is a result that contributes to a sustainable approach to our environment, but also to our society.

Learn more about the OStogether Initative

EOSNet is part of the project MOST (Meaningful Open Schooling Connects Schools To Communities) and has received funding from European Horizon 2020 Programme. Together with eight other EU funded projects we are part of the joint initiative OStogether. Together we want to raise awareness on the opportunities of Open Schooling and on the different methodologies to implement this concept.

To give you more inspiration and a comprehensive overview of current Open Schooling activities, we present and link our partner projects below.

Sharing the same goal, we developed common channels to raise awareness on the opportunities of open schooling and on the different methodologies to implement this concept. Find our latest guidelines, best practices, research outcomes, and upcoming events by following @OStogether on Twitter and Facebook as well as by signing up for the Open Schooling together newsletter.

 

More Open Schooling Initiatives

Make it Open

Make it Open aims to develop a sustainable infrastructure of open schooling in Europe based on the approach of the maker movement. The project will introduce maker education, citizen science, and constructionism learning as transformative approaches to teach and learn STEAM in a more tangible, applicable, and appealing way. It is an approach that positions student self-efficacy, agency, and interest at the center, asking students to see themselves as people who can ask, develop, test, iterate and take part in shaping the world.
Make it Open will create open schooling hubs in 10 European countries where more than 150 schools will collaborate with families, private companies, and civil society organizations, using the maker movement approaches to solve real challenges in and with the community. A MOOC will be offered to teachers to encourage the uptake of the project’s results. It will also contribute to establishing an online community of open schooling educators.

Coordinator: Bloomfield Science Museum, Israel

SALL

SALL – Schools As Living Labs – project proposes the living lab methodology as a technique for the development of open schooling activities linked to science learning in Europe’s schools. This is demonstrated through activities prioritizing a focus on the theme of the food system and its links to the Food 2030 research and innovation policy of the European Union.
The SALL team members come from diverse worlds: schools, universities and research organisations, science centres, NGOs, and business. They join forces with the stakeholder community in order to co-create, implement and evaluate new ways for schools to partner with their local communities and become agents of community well-being through their involvement in co-creative research and innovation in real-life settings.

Coordinator: Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece

OpenScience Hub

The Open Science Hub project engages schools and local stakeholders in using research and innovation as a tool to tackle local relevant challenges and contributing to sustainable community development. Importantly, OSHubs are being created in communities that traditionally do not engage with research and innovation due to various barriers – geographical location, socio-economic status, ethnic minority groups.
For that, OSHubs work as mediators in each local community – as school-driven Science Shops –, facilitating the bridge between the needs of the schools and their local context, and supporting them to become active agents for collaboration between families, universities, industry, local governments, civil and wider society, by engaging in real life projects that meet societal needs.

Coordinator: Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands

PHERECLOS

PHERECLOS builds upon the experience of Children’s Universities (CUs) in Europe and beyond. Due to their engagement with children and young people, they help to breakdown institutional boundaries between universities and the wider society. CU often sit between key organisations in the educational and social landscape, collaborating with both.

The project will establish “Local Education Clusters” (LECs), bringing together schools and further relevant actors in the educational ecosystem of 6 diverse pilot regions. These actors may be universities, governmental and non-governmental organisations, companies, charities, museums or other knowledge providers. The LECs will be incubators for enabling dialogue and for setting-up joint activities between these organisations at the overlapping edges of formal and non-formal education.

At the same time, the project aims to improve the quality of science engagement. PHERECLOS will implement a digital “OpenBadge” system which labels institutions as reliable and responsive actors allowing all LEC parties to become real agents of change in education. At the same time, this ecosystem will highlight individual achievements with respect to STEAM engagement.

PULCHRA

PULCHRA aims to explore the open schooling concept through the theme “Cities as urban ecosystems” by facilitating participation of citizens of all ages in scientific discovery; by building a learning, exploring and activation network; by developing knowledgeable, innovative and participatory communities; and by exploring common issues related to the city as an urban ecosystem through specially designed City Challenges.
City Science Teams are being created in schools with the participation of stakeholders from the wider community. These City Science Teams will scientifically investigate local issues related to cities as urban ecosystems in collaboration with the local community, professionals and other key stakeholders. An online City Challenges Platform facilitates the exchange of information and ideas between participants and partners across the PULCHRA network, promoting the open-schooling participatory focus of the project

Coordinator: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

Connect

We all want more young people to aspire to a career in science, and to be able to think scientifically in their everyday life. Yet the traditional curriculum results in too many students thinking is that ‘science is not for me’. What can we do? According to recent research, these students lack ‘science capital’, especially those from disadvantaged groups. The solution is to add more opportunities into the curriculum for these students to see what scientists do, to talk science with their families, and to appreciate the impact of science on the world.
CONNECT will provide these missing opportunities in the form of add-ons to existing units. that tick many curriculum boxes and are easy for teachers to use:

  • Real-world challenges
  • Future-oriented support from a scientist
  • Engaging family activities
  • Fun tasks to apply science ideas
  • Inclusive strategies for teaching skills
  • Competence-based assessment

Coordinator: The Open University and EXUS, United Kingdom

Seas

SEAS – Science Education for Action and Engagement towards Sustainability – project aims to develop scientific literacies and agencies for solving complex and interdisciplinary sustainability challenges in their local communities. SEAS facilitates collaboration between schools and local communities facing sustainability challenges through open schooling designs and  establishes a flexible and open-ended toolkit of concepts, tools (CChallenge, SenseMaker, LORET, etc) and methods (ChangeLab, Social Design Experiments, etc) designed to support the establishment and development of open-schooling networks where teachers and students can work together with out-of-school partners. Six open-schooling networks have been established in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Italy, Norway and Sweden.

Coordinator: University of Oslo, Norway

Connect with us

Join one of our EOSnet Activities

Open Schooling is about cooperation, co-creation, exchange and working jointly at eye level. When working together on real-world problems, everyone learns from, about and with each other: A scientific approach that takes into account different perspectives, applies what is learned and creates shared responsibility.

This can be implemented in many ways. Here are the ways to become active.

Become a member of the EOSnet!

Are you interested in learning more on Open Schooling and its implementation in your teaching? Would you like to get in touch with other teachers from across Europe? Would you like to participate in an Open Schooling project? Then become a member of the European Open Schooling network (EOSnet)!

EOSnet is the free Open Schooling community on the net. The network is open for new members to join! Let´s learn from and with each other and open the classroom doors now!

As a member, here is what you get:

1h4 for Open Schooling

Get invitations to inspiring workshops: A series of online events highlighting different aspects of Open Schooling and providing a framework for (international) exchange.
Event Calender

News

Good reads, snapshots and more from Open Schoolng activities across Europe
Newsletter from OStogether

Forum

Exchange and network with teachers all over Europe
2

Forum for teachers

Become an Open Schooling community!

The EU funded project MOST (Meaningful Open Schooling Connect Schools To Communities, 2020 – 2023) is the starting point for the EOSnet: Within the frame of the project, schools and citizens from a range of backgrounds jointly launch school-community projects in key regions of ten European countries.

What?

In a school-community-project (SCP), teachers and their students are working together with citizens to tackle an environmental challenge which is relevant for their community. See the best practices from ten European countries.

Why?

School-community projects meet real needs in the community outside school and draw upon local expertise and experience. Leaning in and working together with the real world creates more meaning and more motivation for learners and teachers. Tear down the walls of your classroom and broaden your horizons!

How?

On this website, you will find inspiration, resources and exchange within the community:

Take a look at the INCREASE Trail Map: The step-by-step manual guides you when planning and implementing a school-community project.
The MOST Pedagogical Guidelines provides you pedagogical and scientific materials that can be used as educational basis to run a school-community project.
Visit the EOSnet community on etwinnings and exchange with teachers who have already conducted SCPs.

Are you ready to start your individual school-community-project? Contact us directly. Please write to your National MOST advisor or to the MOST Project Office. We look forward to hearing your ideas and supporting you!

Guidance and Support

We are here to help you on your way to becoming an Open Schooling Community

You can find practical guidance, pedagogical guidelines and further materials that have been developed within the MOST project, but also in other Open Schooling projects. Take what is helpful to you and leave the rest!

Start your own School-Community-Project!

Here you can find some ressources, if you are interested in applying open schooling. Below you can find more supporting information, like a manual or the pedagogical guidelines. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Manual for Schools to plan and perform school-community projects

Discover the 5-step process to start you own SCP

What could a School-Community Project look like? An Example

An eight grade cooperates with community members to reduce waste

Pedagogical Guidelines and Exemplary Science Materials

Learn about pedagogical concepts, collaborative working methods and exemplary best practices as a source of inspiration

Science material on plastic waste: The Ocean – The blue waste dump

A story map about the relationship between humans and the ocean and its current challenges.

More Useful MOST Ressources

Guidelines of MOST Fairs and Setting up of Regional Partnerships

Advice on how to organise science fairs and build sustainable networks for open schools in the region

Brief report about the MOST Fairs

Student empowerment and opening of schools to the community through MOST fairs

European report on the solutions found in the School-Community Projects

Read about amazing results of various school-community projects across Europe

Evaluation concept

The research design and evaluation instruments for assessing the impact of the project

MOST Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation Plan

Lays out the strategies to maximize the impact and visibility of the project.

Brief report about the European MOST final conference

Read about the inspring program of he European MOST conference in Leiden, May 2023

Evaluation report on the impact of the MOST project

provides insights in the evaluation of school-community projects from a systemic perspective

Resources from other Open Schooling Projects

 

Results from the member projects of the OStogether network

How to Implement School-Community-Projects (English Subtitles)

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Contact & Support

Please contact us. We are happy to support you! You can also find direct contact for individual advice here. Our National MOST Advisors look forward to answering your questions.

National MOST Advisors

National MOST Advisors

Lucas Weinberg

University of Innsbruck

Austria

Svatava Janouskova

Charles University

Czech Republic

Sabrina Deck

ICSE at University of Education Freiburg

Germany

Michiel Doorman

Utrecht University

Netherlands

Marytė Skakauskienė

National Education Agency

Lithuania

Marie-Ana Jones

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Norway

Ana Maria Abril

Universidad de Jaén

Spain

Jesper Boesen

Jönköping University

Sweden

Metin Sardag

Hacettepe University

Turkey

THE INTERNATIONAL MOST OFFICE

If you did not find an advisor for your country, please feel free to contact the MOST Project Office. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

Sabine Mickler

ICSE at University of Education Freiburg

MOST Coordinator / Project Office

The EOSNet Community

Join our network to engage with and benefit from our members' experience and expertise

We invite all actors in the field of Open Schooling to network, exchange results and experiences and to further develop and promote the idea of Open Schooling.

Whether you are a teacher, a parent, an active citizen, a business representative, a non-formal learning provider, a university, a school leader or a policy maker, we want you to become a part of the European Open Schoolnet (EOSnet)!

Here you can find out what you get as a member of the EOSnet. Take the first step now, by signing-up for our EOSnet Mailing List:

Join our Network

Participating Countries

MEMBERS & SUPPORTERS

Schools

Austria
Austria
Austria
Austria
Austria
Austria
Austria
Netherlands
Netherlands

Community Actors

Austria
Austria
Germany
Germany
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Norway
Norway
Sweden
Sweden

Supporters

Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Norway
Norway
Sweden

For data protection reasons, we are currently only listing institutions. If you wish to be listed as an individual, please contact us.

If you want to network with any of the listed schools or institutions, please contact your national most advisor!

National MOST Advisors

National MOST Advisors

Lucas Weinberg

University of Innsbruck

Austria

Svatava Janouskova

Charles University

Czech Republic

Sabrina Deck

ICSE at University of Education Freiburg

Germany

Michiel Doorman

Utrecht University

Netherlands

Marytė Skakauskienė

National Education Agency

Lithuania

Marie-Ana Jones

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Norway

Ana Maria Abril

Universidad de Jaén

Spain

Jesper Boesen

Jönköping University

Sweden

Metin Sardag

Hacettepe University

Turkey

THE INTERNATIONAL MOST OFFICE

If you did not find an advisor for your country, please feel free to contact the MOST Project Office. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

Sabine Mickler

ICSE at University of Education Freiburg

MOST Coordinator / Project Office

NOW IT IS YOUR TURN!

Do you want to be part of the EOSnet? Do you want to share your own story? Or are you ready to start your own SCP?

We want to hear from you and are here to support you!

Contact us if you want your project featured on this website or for individual advice and guidance in implementing your own Open Schooling project.

Contact us now!

Find Your national Most advisor

THE INTERNATIONAL MOST OFFICE

If you did not find an advisor for your country, please feel free to contact the MOST Project Office. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

Sabine Mickler

ICSE at University of Education Freiburg

MOST Coordinator / Project Office

The creation of these resources has been funded with the support of the Horizon2020 programme of the European Union under grant no. 871155. The European Union/European Commission is neither responsible for the content nor liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.

 

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