COSMOS breaks down school walls

Karolien: "Novaplus pays a lot of attention to STEM at school. During the STEM lab, 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 make a connection with the world outside the school walls. After all, how do you know that the issues pupils are working on actually are societally relevant? And how do you know that the solutions pupils bring in are also actionable? Those questions remained 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."

During the Cosmos project, Novaplus received support from Djapo and the KdG University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

"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 teaching methods that allow them to translate a societal issue into an authentic research question."

"During the launch of the 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 to vandalism and drug use. Based on that list and challenges, the teachers and pupils selected one square they wanted to investigate further."