Scie-Citizens believes in the power of participation in education. The partnership was built upon realizing that the role of facts become again more and more relevant for every citizen. The partners are aware that in lifelong learning the “academic ivory tower” seems to be the ultimate bastion, resisting to be involved with other learning paths. However, the approach of Citizens Science is an innovative methodology, involving both top-down but as well from a grass-root level learners and citizens to be involved in research and science. We believe that instead of reinventing methods, it will be more productive to evaluate existing tools, identify smart practices, collect, review and share them. Thus, Scie-Citizens consists out of partner from different education sectors, covering the geographic scope of all of Europe. The mission of Scie-Citizens is to advance citizen science through knowledge sharing, collaboration, capacity building, and advocacy. The project aims to encourage broad and meaningful participation in citizen science through promoting inclusive and collaborative partnerships and facilitating a community that shares practices, knowledge, and tools to bring recognition to the value and impact of citizen science. The project seeks to create an assessment tool for identifying smart practices using citizen science approaches and collect those practices in a method handbook. The handbook will be a tool-box for trainers, teacher and other facilitators to create innovative and tested instructions all over Europe and across all educational sectors. During 7 project meetings we will work on 70 good practice examples, and 7 policy briefs, which will be published in a comprehensive project eBook. All methods will be documented, collected and published at the end of the project. In order to identify smart practices, the partnership will collect indicators and create an assessment tool. The tool and the method handbook will be open accessible and will be used by institutions from all education sectors in formal and non-formal learning. The project can be understood as a pre-assessment of the needs to create and test European curricula in citizenship building. The project targets directly trainer and teacher in all educational sectors. We expect the participants of the project to extend their knowledge on using citizens science methods in their curricula. We expect participants organizations to professionalize and innovate their curricula through new methods. We expect learners to become more motivated to perform lifelong learning and we expect stakeholders to become more aware on the need to include participatory methods in teaching and training. As declared in the Digital Market Strategy, European citizens need innovative approaches to keep up-to-date in the ever changing work market. A key 21st competence is the so called Information Literacy, the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand. This became even more relevant lately, in the time of skepticism towards science and the wake of misinformation and so called “Fake News”. The European Commission is tackling the spread of false information through their code of conduct to combat illegal online hate speech. The problem is rather tackled through self-regulation of the social media outlets. However, a more securing way to fit counter information is to engage and enable citizens to fact check and getting involved in both addressing and researching publicly perceived problems and deficits. A conduct on citizen science will help to inform the public and empower the European Citizens to assess information received.
“We empower people from all walks of life to engage and perform in high end science.” Max Kushnier at the ScieCitizens Meeting in Iasi, 2019 Scie-Citizens believes in the power of participation in education. Thus, thhe mission of Scie-Citizens is to advance citizen science through knowledge sharing, collaboration, capacity building, and advocacy. The project encouraged citizens participation science by facilitating a community that shares practices, knowledge, and tools to bring recognition to the value and impact of citizen science. The emerging message from the partnerhship is, first of all, that science has to be accessible by the society. The partners committed to looking for open processes working as bridges, where both scientists and citizens are involved. For Scie-Citizens, science is a multidisciplinary power - making positive changes possible. It’s moved by curiosity of understanding complex systems: human and the contexts where we’re living. It’s based on structured methods and a specific common language, not always understandable and, often, intimidating to the people outside of the scientific bubble. Therefore a smart practice combines different elements to create something new for a specific context with a specific need - it should have the following features: be Open Source, accessible, circular use, process based, building new relations and based on scientists-citizens collaboration. In creating an assessment tool, based on common reviewed indicators we identified 82 practices and published a representative selection in an ebook. The role especially of adult education in citizens science had be defined to four areas: 1.Dialogue between science and society 2. Co-creation of new knowledge 3. Creating positive Change 4. support of the society to understand needs and formulate challenges The 7 partners from Germany (CRN), Italy (School Raising), Romania (CRCE), Greece (EA), Sweden (Changemaker) and Poland (Midicentrum, SAN) addressed directly trainer and teacher in all educational sectors and provided them with a tool-box full of practices ready to be included in their everyday teaching, helping to bridge the gap between science and society. By providing a reviewed dataset of tested practices, we offered both stakeholders and educators an overview of existing training tools and methods helping to overcome barriers to participation. Educitizens believe that instead of reinventing methods, it is more productive to evaluate existing tools in all sectors, focusing on cross-sectoral cooperation. The consortium itself consisted out of partners working in non-formal adult (CRN, CRCE), school education (EA, and School Raising), non-formal education in a public body (Midicentrum) and higher/vocational education (SAN). Additional external stakeholders contributed further to the review of the practices (e.g. High Schools in Poland, Adult and Vocational training provider in Germany, Romania, Italy and Poland,), higher education instiutions in Finland and Poland, SMEs and Policy Maker (Berliner Senatsverwaltung, City of Suwalki, City of Gothenburg). The project thus had direct horizontal impact and contributed to an open and innovative education. ScieCitizens contributed to the growth of a citizen science network with a commitment to future collaborations. The partners gathered inspirations by project itself, the smart practices and ideas on citizen science affecting the worldview and offering knowledge on opportunities to implement new initiatives and collaborations. The partner organisations got familiar with a wealth of smart practices that are incorporated into our science citizens program and stareted to transfer and implement smart practices in internal programs. Finally the organisations and participants got inspired and enriched by the work of the others and their involved staff acquired new skills and knowledge by participating in the workshops developed during the project. The sustainable use of the results is crucial. Collecting, reviewing and documenting the smart practices are considered as a first step. The methods might be the source for training modules on integrating research into the various sectors after the project ended. Since the results are relevant for all education sectors a good documentation is needed. Therefore, the practices are published centrally on a database on the project webpage. The database islinked to all institution web pages of the partnership. The links ensure, that the results will be integrated in the all-day working structure of each partner. The practices has been published as a downloadable ebook and as printed booklet with specific ISBN. The publications have become available and downloadable through library catalogues, and as well the EPALE resource center, where they will be stored sustainable.