Open Schooling Summer School 2021
5-9 July 2021

The “Towards an Open and e-Mature School” Summer School aims to familiarize participants with the open schooling approach that provides a powerful framework for school heads and teachers to engage, discuss and explore: how schools need to evolve, transform and reinvent; how schools facilitate open, more effective and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of educational content tools and services for personalized science learning and teaching; how schools can become innovation incubators and accelerators.
It has been designed to promote the use of self-reflection tools as a vehicle to support innovation and systemic change in schools. It proposes an innovation support framework and a roadmap to schools seeking to introduce a change culture that ensures a meaningful uptake of sustainable innovation.
It will focus on the use of self-reflection tools as a valid way to support innovation and systemic change in education. Participants will explore how schools may move from self-reflection to developing a comprehensive plan of action that utilises the results of a self-evaluation exercise, but, crucially, in combination with fundamental principles and mechanisms of European educational policy for schools.

Furthermore, the “Towards an Open and e-Mature School” Summer School will present the concept of Schools as Living Labs. Living labs are user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on a systematic user co-creation approach integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings. In the educational context, we engage the living lab methodology as a technique of crucial value in the heart of initiatives of open schools, which, in cooperation with other stakeholders, aspire to become agents of community well-being by creating new partnerships in their local communities.
The summer school will also present the concept of Digital Media Literacy for Active Citizenship to promote critical thinking and democratic values. Digital advances have brought new challenges for Europe’s pupils, students and teachers. Algorithms used by social media sites and news portals can be powerful amplifiers of bias or fake news, while data privacy has become a key concern in the digital society. EU citizens, but above all young students are vulnerable to cyber bullying and harassment, predatory behaviour or disturbing online content.
Finally, the summer school will discuss Biomimicry, an interdisciplinary approach that uses living organisms as a model to meet the challenges of sustainable development (economic, environmental and social). It will present way for enhancing competences and awareness on biomimicry in the School Community, including students, parents, teachers and directors and Informal Science Education Providers, while reinforcing the sustainability principle in schools for the whole school community.
Participants will look at how schools can be supported in using these tools to understand the current position of the organisation and build on the results to define and implement suitable action plans by applying a step by step support mechanism for school heads and teachers.
Visit the webpage of the summer school and register here