The project intends to foster the overcoming of personal, cultural and social vulnerabilities of minors and their families through the co-creation of an open school model. For this purpose it adopts a circular intervention strategy that moves down from the national level to the local contexts. The partners established a network of 13 school-based educational presidia, designed as immersive and inclusive physical places open to the entire community also during extracurricular hours: the STEM*Labs
National
Italy
1. Lombardy (Municipality of Milan, Municipality of Cremona)
2. Piedmont (Municipality of Turin, Municipality of Settimo Torinese, Municipality of Cuneo)
3. Campania (Municipality of Naples, Municipality of Ercolano)
4. Sicily (Municipality of Palermo, Municipality of Partinico)
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Consorzio Kairos Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Lea Last name of representative: Iandiorio Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Project Manager Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Giambattista Lulli n. 7/8 Town: Turin Postal code: 10148 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 346 664 8510 E-mail:projects@consorziokairos.org Website:https://consorziokairos.it/
URL:https://www.facebook.com/stemlabitalia Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #stem #stemlab #stem #stempertutti #conibambini #innovazione #education #scuoladelfuturo #softskills #formazionecontinua #povertàeducativa #comunitàeducante #SPACELab #STEMeducation #STEAM #STEMforall #learning #education #skills4school #STEMcareers
The STEM*Lab project intends to promote the overcoming of personal, cultural and social vulnerabilities of young learners and their families in a logic of prevention of educational poverty, through the co-creation of local public schools as innovation hubs and open educational presidia, and the development of multidisciplinary innovative methodologies for a more diverse and inclusive STEAM education.
This project aims to strengthen the skills and innovation capacity of minors and families in disadvantaged areas through the prototyping and dissemination of a replicable STEM*Lab model based on transdisciplinary and playful educational tools, and by doing so to allow the local communities to rediscover the centrality of the school as a laboratory for inclusion and experimentation, and therefore foster a new sense of belonging. This model starts from the assumption that STEM*Labs are not isolated places but fit into a specific social context with its dormant opportunities, retained skills and resources.
The National Working Group developed innovative and inclusive educational methodologies, to be experimented locally but coordinated nationally through the creation of a network of 13 educational presidia (the STEM*Labs), physical and immersive spaces set in schools, re-imagined and co-created as open and inclusive experimentation incubators.
The local-to-national networking action allowed to widen the initial educating community into a stable and sustainable community of practice: since march 2019, partners have been establishing educational presidia in 4 different regions (Piedmont, Lombardy, Campania and Sicily), each presidia being co-created by a multitude of different stakeholders in different knowledge fields and with different competencies, who worked together to implement site-specific actions and to achieve the common objectives in response to the needs of local communities.
Multidisciplinarity
Social Inclusion
Innovative education
Community engagement
Sustainable requalification
The sustainability actions of STEM*Lab are compiled in a strategy designed in synergy with the entire project partnership to analyse and transform the project results into concrete actions at local and national level.
This strategy is ensuring:
1) an efficient implementation of the project results in the activities of the four Italian regions involved
2) the availability of the project results (13 STEM classrooms, educational materials produced, workshops, etc.)
3) the maintenance of local, regional and national networks created during the project activities
4) possibility of future development of the project and its scalability at European level.
The sustainability of the project action and results is ensured by the following actions:
1. Activities in community spaces in vulnerable and marginal urban areas
2. The sustainability of the life of community spaces will be ensured by the local network action carried out during the whole project with the aim of activating public and private actors able to participate in the life of each presidia.
3. Toolkit Open Source will be published on the Consorzio Kairos website in march. https://percorsiconibambini.it/stemlab/
4. Immersive educational space within MUST (Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci)
The new educational space created at MUST, one of the scientific project partners, is a permanent resource for STEM education, always accessible and thus able to guarantee the continuity of the project's actions. For at least 10 years, the Museum's workshop and its educational programmes can be included in the curricular and/or extracurricular activities also of other schools not involved in the project and can be offered and delivered to families with children aged between 5 and 14 years on a permanent and continuous form.
The project aims at co-designing innovative high quality learning spaces , in the school present into the marginal urban areas, converting them into inclusive, attractive and sustainable spaces capable of fostering young people's skills and critical thinking, through the STEM disciplines, according to the 2030 Agenda Goals and the New European Competence Framework. The co-creation of the 13 STEM*Labs in the partner schools made it possible to strengthen the centrality of the school in community life as a place of learning, exchange, socialisation and growth. The schools, in collaboration with the scientific partners and the territorial actors involved, activated their own educational presidia, understood as a physical place located in the school and open to the entire community, also during out-of-school and/or summer hours.
The setting up of the presidia envisaged, according to the needs expressed by the schools, renovation and/or enabling interventions such as the purchase of equipment, technological instruments and teaching materials. The presidia thus became a meeting place for students, encouraging in them a sense of re-appropriation of school spaces in which they could experiment with positive models of using their free time.
In addition to the school presidia, the project activated a new immersive environment within MUST - Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci (Presidio Highlight). In an initial phase, this place served for research and design purposes. Once developed, the educational environment made it possible to disseminate the methodology and tools in the long term.
The project's launched a specific action that made it possible to include families in the children's and young people's education. This was made possible through the planning of common activities (in continuity with the educational paths taken by the children at school) capable of encouraging the sharing of experiences and cooperative learning between adults and children.
STEM* Lab value accessibility of learning opportunities and diversity in knowledge-making spaces as their core objectives: the project aims to support the overcoming of personal, cultural and social vulnerabilities of minors and their families as part of an educational poverty prevention plan, focusing specifically on the creation of an open school model and on the use of inclusive methodologies for STEAM education. All the territories involved, while having a strong territorial identity, present various critical social, cultural and economic disadvantages that prevent children and their families from accessing quality education and, consequently, the opportunities for their social mobility, empowerment and personal development.
The project is improving the communities’ quality of life by re-imagining more inclusive and sustainable learning spaces, from an intergenerational, multidimensional, multicultural and intersectional perspective: taking part in the activities is free of charge to reach a wider and more diversified audience and to establish bridges between people with different backgrounds. The methodology developed allows to re-arrange the activities to meet the learning needs of people with a learning impairment, a neurodivergence, a disability or a challenging socio-cultural background (e.g. young people with a migratory background), who are usually impaired from exploring, experiencing and accessing certain fields of knowledge and therefore excluded from the opportunities to reshape our societies and move local communities forward.
Furthermore, particular attention is given to the activation of stakeholders’ synergies in a co-design perspective as well as territorial networks of support through cooperative learning methodologies: families were involved in the educational pathway of their children through common activities and common moments of sharing.
STEM* Labs project focuses on the promotion of cognitive (hard) skills and non-cognitive (soft, relational) skills by offering inclusive experiential learning opportunities and by inspiring the new generation into becoming aware change-makers and active citizens. The project raises awareness of current social, environmental and economical issues, exploring inquiry-based learning practices to co-design possible solutions: in this sense, STEM* Labs help learners to become critical thinkers, as well as to develop their agency and their decision-making skills by exploring the connections between science, technology and art: computational thinking, coding, robotics and tinkering are used to foster inclusion and combat vulnerability and marginalisation.
The project transformed the way learners approach knowledge and problem-solving, as well as re-shaping the relationship between public schools and local communities: STEM* Labs are designed to be spaces of relational proximity that offer opportunities for innovation, dialogue and exchange, to support collaborative practices that enhance the territory's potential and to encourage the reappropriation of public spaces. STEM* Labs generate synergies between different actors in the area, creating a connection and a positive interchange with other local community presidia such as libraries, recreational centres, fab labs, museums and cultural institutions, community and youth centres, as a way to establish multi-level engagement networks with direct and indirect impact in the local community. Civil societies experience a positive impact in the medium-to-long period, allowing a wider audience in disadvantaged and deprived areas to access quality education and life-long learning opportunities, as well as empowering learners and their families to retail new competencies and develop a sense of belonging, and creating a community of practice for teachers, educators and experts in the STEAM multidisciplinary methodology.
STEM*Lab is the result of a wide-range heterogeneous partnership that brought to the project the best competencies in both formal and non-formal STEAM education, in tackling vulnerabilities and activating territorial networks. The stakeholders involved in the project action are territorial leaders (total of 4), scientific partners (5), third sector partners (10), schools (13), and institutions (8). In addition to those, there are the partners in charge of carrying out key actions at the local level and of national value: Associazione Plug (communication), Associazione Isnet (evaluating body), educating the community and other organisations.
Internal and external stakeholders were involved in the project design phase, through online consultations (focus groups, round tables, interviews, etc.) in which they discussed the needs of local, regional and national educational communities and how to provide practical and innovative answers.
In the implementation phase, stakeholders have been mainly involved in the following activities: 3 annual meetings (local network action) for each project phase, which had the aim intrinsic to detect and integrate new members with a view to the sustainability and replicability of the project activities;+12 meetings of the lead partner and the territorial leaders at the coordination table;+9 remote meetings of the Working Group; 2 national co-designing and training workshop to share methodology; 4 workshops of co-design and training at territorial level organised by the territorial leaders and conducted by the scientific partners participating in the national wks to transfer the experience to teachers and local operators; 8 on-site enabling interventions with MUST monitoring for sharing methodologies and resources developed in the first year and training; 6 presentations/meetings organised in community places; 4 webinars of which two educational community, Science Capital, Recovery Fund; 1 BookLab workshop on writing.
The project reflects knowledge in the educational, social and scientific fields. In particular, this knowledge is the result of a heterogeneous partnership which provides the best expertise both in formal and non-formal education in the STEAM field, in contrasting vulnerabilities and in the activation of territorial networks, to ensure the achievement of the project’s objectives.
Since March 2019, partners have been working at the national and local levels. In particular, for each level, a space has been co-created in which the partners, according to their roles, work together to implement the actions planned to achieve the common objectives.
The project action added value has its basis in the organisational structure and processes, as they were designed and implemented with the aim of enhancing the exchange of experience and prior knowledge consistent with the project activities but also produced in the course of the project. The national level includes scientific partners and territorial leaders who are working together in the working group which is a place of design and contamination. Since the beginning of the project, the working group has worked mainly remotely using open-source communication and collaboration tools. In particular, the partners met three times remotely (once per year) to compare and align their activities. Kairos also met the different partners in their regions over the three years in order to facilitate the exchange of good practices and monitor the progress of the project action. Furthermore, the lead partner and the territorial leaders had 21 coordination meetings at the key project moments. The local level is characterised by a higher presence exchange (including scientific partners, territorial leaders, operators, schools and municipalities): 3 annual meetings (local network action) were held for each project phase to promote connection, collaboration, territorial partnerships, sharing and dissemination of results.
The main innovation of the project consists in overcoming a traditional approach to both STEAM education and interventions to combat social exclusion, in order to design an integrated and structured intervention that positively affects learners, based on the inherent capacity of STEM education programmes to develop soft skills that are indispensable for the promotion of active citizenship. STEM*Labs are a powerful didactic tool for curricular and extra-curricular teaching in STEAM to prevent educational poverty and strengthen the relationships within the educating community. The methodological innovation aims to introduce an approach that stimulates children to learn and experience first-handily, to discover their own abilities, cultivate their talents and broaden their aspirations.
Specifically, the innovations of the intervention consist of:
- Creation of an integrated and replicable approach involving the local communities based on the transformation of school spaces into innovative educational environments, inclusive and integrated with the services and resources existing on the territory;
- Development of new multidisciplinary STEAM-based educational practices to enhance personal; empowerment and active citizenship competencies in order to reduce inequalities and achieve important skills in contemporary society;
- Promotion of cooperative learning between children and adults through involvement in joint experiences
- Co-design and active community involvement in all project processes, increasing the level of sharing, usability and effectiveness of the solutions that will be implemented;
- Value given to diversity (gender, linguistic and socio-cultural) through processes of inclusion, to enhance cognitive, relational and social skills, towards an idea of participative education oriented to produce positive impacts.
The STEM*Lab project is designed with the aim of creating a highly sharable and sustainable multi-level innovative educational model.
In particular, the main replicable and scalable components of the project are:
- 13 innovative labs co-created within schools to foster the approach of children and young to STE(A)M disciplines;
- labs and workshops to implement children's and young people's knowledge and raise their awareness on issues related to social inclusion, active citizenship, climate change, gender equality, etc.
- the innovative and trans-disciplinary educational method, real core of repeatability and transferability, with the successful and already implemented activities;
- the co-design territorial networking methodology;
- the “HOW TO kit for building a STEM*Lab" to be disseminated nationwide, useful for modelling the activities of the presidia already active.
The project has been implemented in different urban and peri-urban areas all around Italy with great results, moreover in the last year of activity, other spaces were involved in the project to extend the project idea to the whole territory and to foster opportunities for contamination and connection of the local presidia with the territorial educating community. In this sense, a possible future of the project could be to formalise the STEM*Labs network by configuring it as an incubator of new projects and exchanges of competencies between the subjects that in various capacities are part of the educating communities, at a national level.
The multidisciplinary and replicable methodological approach, realised through the project activities, aims at overcoming a traditional approach to STEAM education and actions to contrast social exclusion, by merging two worlds, which often respond to different project logics and objectives, in order to realise an integrated and structured intervention that positively affects minors from early childhood onwards. This objective has been carried forward by the working group, through research and listening actions with stakeholders inside and outside the partnership, with the aim of designing an educational methodology whose main tools are 13 STEM*Labs and the co-design and training workshops. The first is beautiful, inclusive, accessible and sustainable places where students could have experiences that help develop an interest in science, technology and the implications on everyday life. While the latter enables teachers and practitioners to design educational paths that put students at the centre, enhancing the immediacy of experiments and processes and the wealth of experience to create a direct relationship with STEM topics on a cognitive, emotional, physical and social level. The proposed methodology, therefore, aims to leave the frontal, mono-directional, positivist approaches behind to make way for observation, the scientific method, creativity, and participatory processes, enhancing the student's personal background as a tool for learning, understanding, and experience. The common approach co-constructed by the teachers, scientific partners and practitioners conveyed within the STEM* Labs' internal and external activities is inquiry-based learning, through which students are experimenting with the connections between science, technology and art, and treating digital tools as a new means of expressing their ideas and using them within disciplinary practices.
The most recent educational policies at the European and national levels place STEAM education and digital culture at the centre of their action as fundamental tools for building the competencies of contemporary citizens and implementing social welfare by valuing individuals and their potential and favouring inclusion. Our project structures its actions on the basis of these indications, aiming to overcome a traditional approach to STEAM education and interventions to combat social exclusion, educational poverty, and lack of accessibility and diversity in STEAM professions, and to concert an integrated and structured intervention that positively affects communities. For this reason, it adopts a circular intervention strategy that will descend from the national level to local contexts and vice versa, making it possible to disseminate public policy guidelines and guarantee permeability between the national regulatory system and the actors implementing these policies locally.
The territories identified share economic deprivation and social and cultural exclusion, a high risk of early school drop-outs, and educational poverty. According to the Educational Poverty Index in Save the Children's Report "Liberating children from educational poverty: where are we?" There is a close correlation between material and educational poverty, showing how in some areas economic and cultural poverty feed off each other and together contribute to generating marginalisation: this is the case of SicilIa and Campania, which register the highest level of vulnerability on the national territory. Starting from these data, it was decided to operate in four regional contexts that represent the extremes of the Italian situation: by networking these regions, the project intends to create a community of practice that encourages the exchange of positive experiences between territories located in different regional contexts, which share common criticalities (e.g. access to STEAM professions).
STEM* Lab is an ongoing project officially started in 2019 that is heading towards its final phases, mainly focused on the dissemination of the final results, impact evaluation and implementation of the MOOC 'STEM for future citizens. According to the Mid-term report the activities reached the following outputs:
- Reduction of educational poverty through actions that strengthen the educating community. This result entails the involvement of 700 teachers, 2400 parents, 12,000 minors involved of whom at least 170 have a migrant background.
- Activation of integrative spaces and services inside and outside schools. This result entails the involvement of at least 1,700 minors continuously in curricular and extracurricular activities, 250 educational services started up since the beginning of the project, 28 school plexuses involved in extracurricular activities dedicated to minors and families, active at the time of the survey
- Integration and extension of networks between the actors of the educational systems through actions able to strengthen the educating community. 12 protocols, network agreements or conventions, active at the time of the survey, stipulated with public bodies; 40 new networks, also informal, activated by parents or other members of the educating community; 100 interventions carried out at least once a week, active in the area at the time of the survey, involving at least 3 different bodies; 48 protocols, network agreements or conventions.
- Strengthening parents' skills and capacities 2400 parents or guardians involved in project activities. 460 recipients in disadvantaged conditions with respect to the target result and taken into care; 8000 recipients involved in related activities;350 recipients; improving life skills.
- Strengthening of life skills of minors and reinforcement of basic skills of minors. 2000 addresses (taken into care, disadvantaged) improving mathematical skills (specify evaluation); 12000 addressees activities
The project initiative is enabling the development of crucial competencies for students aged 5 to 14, teachers, educators and families. In particular, the first group of beneficiaries has been able to improve their competencies through a series of educational opportunities implemented in different territories for different age groups. Each curricular and extracurricular lab was designed based on an innovative, integrated and replicable approach developed synergistically by the project partners, through the integration in it of strategies to combat the vulnerabilities identified in the schools (including learning disorders, language and cultural mediation, cyberbullying, education in the use of media and IT tools). The use of innovative teaching practices focused on inquiry-based learning for STEAM education has contributed to the building of active citizenship skills for children.
In the mid-term report as well as in the territorial surveys carried out by the various partners, it emerges how minors have developed a strong sense of belonging regarding the socio-educational and cultural context, not only of their city but of the entire world, consequently today they want to be co-changers in the response to the climate emergency, social inequality, etc. Furthermore, the involvement of families has enabled them to incorporate the values of sustainability.
Lastly, the co-design and training of teachers allowed them to increase their educational, social and cultural competencies, as well as their abilities to create inclusive educational pathways that focus on STEM education for the development of 21st-century competencies in the new generations, such as critical thinking, creativity, the ability to innovate, self-confidence, resilience, intentionality, flexibility, motivation, and leadership
