COSMOS breaks down school walls

Karolien: "Novaplus pays a lot of attention to STEM at school. During the STEM lab, second-grade pupils learn, for example, to investigate socio-economic and scientific problems, ask critical questions and look for solutions from a STEM perspective. Learning from and with each other is central there."

"Yet teachers felt the need to link even more with the world outside the school walls. After all, are the issues around which pupils work always socially relevant? And are the solutions devised workable for the actors involved? That remained a bit of a blind spot. With the COSMOS project, the school hopes to open the door to the outside world and start structural partnerships with social players in the neighbourhood."

Novaplus received support from the Karel de Grote Hogeschool and Djapo during the COSMOS project.

"The KdG team took care of the research component. Among other things, the researchers mapped out how involved the school is and to what extent SSIBL didactics and open learning are included in the elaboration of the project. Djapo in turn introduced the teachers to the didactics and provided working methods that allow them to translate a social issue into an authentic research question together with the pupils."

"During the launch of the pilot project, the teachers noticed that they did not know the neighbourhood around the school very well. So they called in the help of the police. The police provided them with a list of local squares with one or more challenges: from noise pollution and fly-tipping to vandalism and drug use. Based on that list and challenges, the teachers and pupils together selected one square they wanted to investigate further."

The next step? Looking for solutions. "Students choose one challenge per group on which they wanted to focus. They investigated that challenge through one or more methods of working system thinking, so that they got a better understanding of the complexity of the problem. Finally, they used their STEM skills to come up with a solution. A very valuable journey!"