The Commission calls upon European initiatives to carry out considerable experimentation in the field of fostering innovation interest, engagement and capacity among students in early schooling – and to encourage schools to create such learning experience that helps build up new generations of young European innovators.Students need authentic, practical experiences and realistic learning environments as essential parts of active learning. Teachers need to have access to a varied new range of resources in order to build activities for students that are as true to life as possible, bringing the outside world into the school. (Commission, Entrepreneurship Education, 2011)The Commission’s invitation should be seen against the background of changing Europe from traditional industry to innovation economy in the widest sense of this term.To play a competitive role in the globalized economy, Europe is increasingly depending on a population of innovators and entrepreneurs, in particular dependent on new generations of young people with innovation interest, skills and capacity.The Commission calls for such experimentation across all educational sectors, and with a special focus on early education and supported by relevant European funding mechanisms, including in particular Erasmus+ and Horizon.This is in the iYouth context called the Empowering European’s Young Innovators Agenda.The iYouth project forms part of this Agenda through its contributions to the exploration of how to, in practice, foster innovation interest, engagement and capacity in secondary school.The project will create and openly share guidelines, documentation and knowledge produced through the project’s intensive experimentation requiring substantial co-driving and co-creation of the involved five student teams from different European countries.The project will produce its results through taking the student teams (mixed aged and gendered teams of 12 - 15 years old secondary students) through four progressive 6-month phases of innovation engagement, progressing from an opening trying out phase to more complex innovation engagement phases:Go Innovate! 1 – LOCAL (Community driven)Go Innovate! 2 – SHARING (Youth-driven)Go Innovate! 3 – COLLABORATIVE (Community-driven+)Go Innovate! MAX – CO-CREATIVE (Project-driven)The innovation engagement will address local societal challenges and include considerable open schooling collaboration with cross-sector community resources.Each of the Go Innovate! Phases will build on the project’s innovation engagement methodology platform, taking the student teams through the full circle of innovation engagement from simple curiosity to co-creation capacity.The project’s Innovation Engagement Circle consists of five progressive steps:- Innovation Curiosity- Innovation Interest- Innovation Engagement- Innovation Skills- Innovation Capacity[The project’s Innovation methodology is detailed and illustrated in the Attachment Pack]All project activities will work through real-life and real-time local societal challenges in collaboration with small eco-systems of community resources (the open schooling approach). All project processes will involve the student teams as co-drivers and co-creators of activities and results.The post-project sustainability of those local eco-systems is a major priority in the project.The participating student teams from each secondary school will be supported each by 2 dedicated teachers, and the accumulated experience and knowledge on how to foster innovation engagement in early schooling will be shared with the entire teaching community. The project is expected to deliver significant contributions to the Empowering European’s Young Innovators Agenda through its authentic and intensive experimentation, the documentation of this experimentation and the creation of valuable and useful outcomes for secondary schools across Europe as well as for European policy and research communities dedicated to develop innovation engagement in early schooling.The key outcomes of the project will be:The iYouth Resource CentreThe iYouth Practical Guidance CollectionThe iYouth 30-minute VideoThe iYouth Policy PaperThe iYouth special: Research Recommendations for the Empowering European’s Young Innovators AgendaThe project consortium includes 3 knowledge partners with considerable didactic and virtual capacities, 5 practice partners (secondary schools) from 5 different countries and a quality and exploitation partner with 15 years in European collaboration.All practice partners are dedicated to engage fully in the project’s experimentation, and the engagement across the curriculum is formally endorsed by the school managements and by the public authorities to which the school refers.[The endorsements are documented in the iYouth Attachment Pack]Among its activities the 5-day iYouth Encounter holds a special position and brings together the participating student teams
The iYouth project responded to continued calls from such global institutions as the European Commission and the OECD to re-think education and to help equip the new generations of students with the skills and competences they need in their new globalized world. Thus iYouth formed and forms part of the Commission’s “re-thinking education agenda”. Among the highest priorities in this agenda are the development of entrepreneurial competences and innovation competences. The iYouth project was missioned to explore how schools and teachers can create innovation interest and capacity among 12-16 years old secondary school students – in close collaboration with community/societal resources and through offering the student teams real-life missions to accomplish. It was clear from the beginning that such innovation interest and capacity cannot be taught traditionally in the classroom. This means that creating entrepreneurial, innovation and other important 21st century skills among secondary school students call for a dramatically new organization of learning: it is not simply about adding new content to the curricula, but about the dramatic fact that these important 21st century skills simply cannot be acquired within traditional academic didactics. The iYouth project was aware of this from the very beginning, therefore creating such activity forms as real-life and real-time engagement in innovation processes in the community. However, during the project this approach was refined and further developed into an authentic open schooling approach, more systematically describing and exploring the key features of the open schooling methodology: the innovation activities are organized as community missions, no teaching takes place and learning happens when needed and relevant, all activities are community relevant and take place in close interaction with community/societal innovation resources – and all activities address important challenges in real-life and in real-time. The most important element in this open schooling approach is agency: the innovation interest and the innovation capacity can only be developed through taking action in the real world. It is precisely through the students’ agency that they build interest, capacity and competences. The outcomes of the project are based on such experimentation in 5 secondary schools from across Europe, involving almost 100 secondary school students engaging in a number of community driven, student driven or project driven innovation projects, relevant to the community and producing new resources in the community. The outcomes can be accessed here: http://iyouths.eu/ The students’ innovation activities at the same time revealed a more or less anticipated challenge: it is very difficult for many schools to practice new forms of education and learning, as schools and teachers are tremendously restricted by increasingly rigid and inflexible curricula, not at all supporting the implementation of the Commission visions. Schools, teachers and students will need to struggle with such “against all odds” realities in their attempt to respond to and support the educational visions of the European Commission and leading educational research. The project’s policy and research recommendations papers address those challenges and point to ways to face the obstacles. The iYouth project will form part of the European practical experimentation bank on which highly needed educational innovation will build in the future. What was not expected and what goes beyond what was foreseen in the application is the fact that the iYouth project will feed into what now has become a long-term plan towards European leadership. The iYouth project has accomplished this mission in the form of providing rich guidance material openly available from the project website. The guidance is based on practical experience, not on educational theory, and is therefore considered most useful to dedicated schools and teachers. Key partners used the iYouth and similar project platforms to design a long-term sustainability strategy entitled “Unteachables but Learnables”. This long-term mission will address the fact that traditional academic teaching is becoming increasingly irrelevant to 21st century youth, and that it needs to be urgently replaced by totally different open schooling, project based and mission based learning processes, empowering the young students’ agency. The “Unteachables but Learnables” platform includes several new 2019 and 2020 Erasmus+ initiatives, exploring various aspects of how to empower young students’ agency. A higher level European initiative is foreseen as a result of this experimentation – resulting in, within a 5 year period, a European leadership in the fields addressed. What was not expected and what goes beyond what was foreseen in the application is the fact that the iYouth project will feed into what now has become a long-term plan towards European leadership.