Both creativity and digital technologies are considered central for success and development in today’s society. Indeed, creative skills are considered essential to face the social, economic changes which feature the XXI Century. Also, the labour market depends more and more on employees’ inventiveness and digital skills. Indeed, an innovative workforce requires both the ability to work with technologies and to adapt, generate new ideas, products and practices. As a result, digital and creative competences have gained the attention of EU policies and have become crucial educational objectives. Nevertheless, there is a gap between policies and practices. EU education fails to keep pace with the creative and digital economies. This is mainly because teachers are not prepared for fully exploiting the potential of technologies and to adopt pedagogical strategies that foster creativity. Although these are current topics in initial teacher education (ITE) policies, curricula usually do not address them in a systematic way. University teacher educators are key players for ensuring the quality of teaching professions and the support of educational innovation. Yet, they are often neglected by policies and are given little opportunities in terms of professional development. Hence, some EU educational systems do not fully benefit from their knowledge and experience. Therefore, opportunities for professional development appear as a need to allow teacher educators for becoming aware of the latest challenges in society and education, so future teachers can learn how to respond to these challenges. DoCENT is a timely response to the aforementioned needs, aiming to enhance digital creativity in ITE contexts. We will develop, implement, validate and disseminate an innovative model to guide teacher educators in applying digital creative teaching practices. Digital creative teaching consists of applying technologies to develop teaching processes that are particular to creativity, i.e. promoting learner-centered methodologies, helping to make connections, providing safe environments that encourage risk-taking, encouraging collaboration, as well as boosting exploration and discovery. In this line, the DoCENT model will use approaches as manipulative technologies, robotics, digital making and digital games. We adopt a cross-curricular approach, to which digital creativity can be applied to any subject, i.e. STEM, social studies and creative expression. Based on acknowledged frameworks of creative processes, DoCENT proposes a five-stage circular model which will engage teacher educators with digital creative teaching practices, consisting of i) raising their awareness on digital creative teaching strategies (“task identification”); ii) developing their competences in terms of how to use and apply digital technologies for teaching creatively (“preparation”); iii) guiding them in planning their own learning scenarios (“response generation”); iv) accompanying them in the application of their scenarios with their students (“outcome”), and; v) validating their scenarios and practices (“response validation”). The DoCENT implementation model will empower teacher educators to become “digital creative teaching ambassadors” who engage and mentor other teacher educators, to help them become experts in turn, in a self-sustainable process. We aim to train 120 teacher educators and involve 800 student-teachers in digital creative learning scenarios. In a strategic partnership, we will gather ITE providers with research centres & companies in the sector of educational technology (EdTech). The consortium defined operational objectives to be achieved: • To provide a pragmatic insight regarding the integration of digital creativity in EU ITE contexts, by designing a framework of digital creative teaching competences (Output 1) and producing guidelines & policy recommendations for enhancing digital creativity in teacher education (Output 4); • To design, implement and validate a training model for enhancing digital creativity in EU Teacher Education, including a curriculum, a MOOC and a series of OER (Output 2); • To integrate pedagogical scenarios related to digital creativity in an innovative training tool based on a serious game and gamification elements (Output 3); • To intertwine ITE providers and EdTech research centres & companies in a community of practice; • To disseminate and exploit the outputs at institutional, national and EU levels by making them freely and easily available to policy makers, practitioners, researchers and educational stakeholders. The project outputs will be implemented in 3 higher educational systems (i.e. Italy, Greece and Spain), learning cultures and socio-economic situations. During the projeThis transnational dimension will allow for ensuring that outputs are usable in different EU backgrounds. The project aims for a tangible and sustainable impact on the participating ITE institutions and systems.
Project summaryThe main goal of the DoCENT project, coordinated by UNINA, was to enhance digital creativity in ITE, through the development, the implementation, the validation and the dissemination of an innovative model to guide teacher educators (and teachers) in applying digital creative teaching practices. According to this aim, the DoCENT project created a model composed by four outputs, linked together starting from the common theoretical base (pedagogical framework) built as a first phase of the project. Namely, (in four European languages and available under Creative Commons):O1- Pedagogical framework O2- MoocO3- Serious gameO4 – Guidelines for practitioners and policy makersStarting from the development phase of DoCENT, the first effort of the consortium, was to put a stake in the ground about the concept of digital creativity in educational context, trying to define it as an activity of individuals mediated by digital technologies, with certain characteristics, that are valuable for learning. UB, having the leading role in this effort, conducted an overview of the EU policies on the integration of digital creative technologies in ITE. Moreover, there was a focus in national level, namely in Italy, Spain and Greece with the contribution of UNINA and NKUA.This framework was reviewed, refined and validated through a consultation process in national level; three consultation workshops were conducted, in Italy, Spain and Greece, following the methodology that FORTH proposed, where the prototype framework was reviewed by a community of educational experts in the domain of digital technology and teacher education (teacher educators, policy makers and practitioners). By the feedback of these consultation workshops, the DoCENT competence framework was developed, which was the basis of the project’s next steps. In parallel, with EUF having the leading role, the criteria and procedures to evaluate the acquisition of digital creative teaching competences by pre-service and in-service teachers in line with the DoCENT framework, were documented. The aim was to define the characteristics of an International Professional Certification Program on this domain.After the phase of designing the theoretical basis on which the implementation would take place, the next step was to produce the educational material that should be used in a series of teachers’ and teacher educators’ workshops. On the one hand the aim was to create a training curriculum, as well as the material (a set of OER/training modules) to support its training goals. In this effort UNINA had the leading role. With the contribution of all partners, and with the technical support of FEDERICA , the DoCENT MOOC was created. The construction of the Mooc was a participatory work, of full co-creation between the partners and with the te. Not only the contents were produced according to the skills of each partner, but also the technical aspects (videorecording) were treated with the utmost homogeneity, the professional manner (see third additional meeting). The Mooc was then monitored, discussed and improved in a participatory manner during the multipiers events.The third element of the DoCENT Model is constitued by the DoCENT Serious Game. This output was led by Smarted srl, being the the technological partner and able to design, develop and implement under a technical aspect the APP of the project. All the Partenrs supported the implementation, in particular UNINA led th O3/A3 Development of Adaptive Tutoring Module for the Serious Game, supporting the creation of artificial and adaptive tutoring for an autonomous and ubiquitous learning. This task was crucial because it strongly relates with the IO1 and DoCENT Competence Framework.The final output was related to the end-product of IO4, that was the creation of a handbook (in four European languages and available under Creative Commons) that addresses to EU’s educational practitioners and policy makers, providing them these guidelines, practical examples, and policy recommendations. Nonetheless, the handbook addresses not only to educators, educational policy makers and teachers, but to anyone interested in the development of digital creative path in teacher education. So, to serve this purpose, it is written terminology-free.The entire project was evaluated by FORTH in activity monitoring, with critical suggestions and the creation of ad hoc tools.Dissemination, coordinated by EUF, took place, in addition to the multiplier events, through scientific and informative channels, and social media coverage. All outputs have a high potential for exploitation, as reported in the dissemination and exploitation report, given their open and shared nature and thanks to the availability of the partners (even local ones like Federica) to keep the project active with updates already planned and maintenance online of the Mooc and the Game.