The aim of the Strategic Partnership is to develop an e-learning course and interactive online portal “Education from Field to School”, offering learning materials and OERs for training of teachers and educators to develop a food and farming learning experience within the school. Using web-based/digital training platforms we will enable educators to acquire new skills and competences, using the theme of food to help tackle social cohesion; diversity issues; entrepreneurship education; critical environmental thinking and opportunities for disadvantaged learners. In turn, these activities will help provide softer outcomes of increased personal development and employability of educators and their pupils, and contribute to the celebration of European cultural heritage. Farms and gardens provide an excellent real-world environment to teach children about food production, environmental issues and the intangible cultural heritage of food. Rather than leave that learning experience at the field gate at the end of the day, we now want to take these practical learning experiences back into the school and classroom. Research on school-farm cooperations have shown that Farm visits are most effective if they are followed up in the classroom before and after the visit and referred back to later during primary education. Through best practice project examples from the partner countries, we will therefore be providing the teaching tools to build on the initial farm visit and embed the learning into the school year. These ideas can include mini school-farms that may grow vegetables or keep chickens, school gardens, schools that have a close and regular link with a nearby farm to grow vegetables (eg Haver til Maver in Denmark), or schools that invite producers in to hold a farmers’ market (eg schools in the Czech Republic and UK). The intangible cultural heritage of food is an enormous resource to promote sustainable food production and consumption, tourism, environmental sustainability and social integration. This food heritage includes the gastronomy traditions, the farming and food production skills and techniques, the cultural traditions and events related to food, the history of a country or region. The training will provide new skills to education and training professionals in both formal as well as informal educational settings. Real-world learning and green spaces bring particular benefits for teachers, who educate pupils with difficulties in mainstream learning systems. Classes including children and youth with special needs (e.g. refugees, children with migrant background, children with developmental disorders, learning disabilities or social problems) get intensive and new experience for the group apart from conventional patterns of learning and competing in classrooms. These Field to School activities can support teachers in integrating those children and young people. A special focus in the project will be refugee children and families. Europe has to face the challenge to integrate a lot of refugees in the society. The “Education from Field to School” has a big potential to offer this group of people new perspectives outside their living in refugee camps. Food and farming offers an insight into the European culture and nutrition behaviour. There are a lot of incentives to learn new vocabulary that is connected with the countryside, agriculture and food commodities. Besides this the food sector is an economically growing branch that needs motivated young people to work in. Job perspectives (as an organic farmer, bakers, butchers, or shop keepers) can be encouraged not only for young European pupils but as well for refugees. Through an online set of best practice examples of Field to School education in various EU countries the project will create tools for target groups to continue and embed the farm experience into the formal as well as informal education. The new project will investigate and showcase examples of best practice in partner countries where the farm visit connection is maintained with the school. The project will: - investigate the examples that partner organisations are involved with - develop case study information and films to demonstrate the activities to others - share the background information required for running these farm links projects through the web-based training platform that has already been developed for Learning on the Bio-Farm - provide open source educational resouces on e-twinning and or the SEG The partnerships consists of 8 partners from 7 countries – Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. The partners are institutions with experiences and competences in different areas of school and farm education.
Context and Background to the Project The aim of the Strategic Partnership was to develop an e-learning course and interactive online portal called “Education from Field to School”, offering learning materials and Open Educational Resources for training teachers and educators and enable them to develop food and farming learning experiences within the school. Farms and gardens provide an excellent real-world environment to teach children about food production, environmental issues and the cultural heritage of food. Our project provides the tools to take these practical learning experiences into the school and classroom. Research on school-farm cooperations have shown that farm visits are most effective if they are followed up in the classroom before and after the visit and referred back to later during primary education. Real-world learning and green spaces bring particular benefits for teachers, who educate pupils with difficulties in mainstream learning systems, and children with special needs. Objectives Our Field to School web-based/digital training platform (www.fieldtoschool.eu) aims to provide support for educators to acquire new skills and competences, using the theme of food to help tackle social and diversity issues; entrepreneurship education; environmental thinking and practical opportunities for disadvantaged learners. In turn, these activities will help provide softer outcomes of increased personal development and employability of educators and their pupils, and contribute to the celebration of European cultural heritage. The training gained will provide new skills to education and training professionals in both formal as well as informal educational settings. The project aimed to: - investigate the best practice Field to School examples that partner organisations are involved with - develop case study information and films to demonstrate the activities to others - share the background information required for running these farm links projects through the web-based training platform - provide open source educational resources on e-twinning and or the SEG - disseminate and promote the project in the partner countries and more widely Number and type of Participants The partnerships consists of eight partners from seven countries – Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. The partners are institutions with experiences and competences in different areas of school and farm education and a core group of staff with relevant experience were involved in meetings and developing the materials . A total of 21 different participants from the partners and eight participants from other organisations were involved in the transnational meetings. Over 3200 participants were involved in the wider engagement and dissemination work of the project. The project delivered the following activities: Didactic guidelines The benefits of Field to School activities and outline to the project e-learning portal were prepared for the guidelines section of the website, with links to all the partner organisations. Transnational meetings Regular Transnational meetings were held throughout the project in the partner countries involved, providing an opportunity to plan and update on progress. Each meeting also included a best practice visit so that meeting participants could discover more about innovative approaches in each country. Case studies We investigated and showcased examples of best practice in partner countries where the farm visit connection is maintained with the school. Our case study section comprises 28 written, photographic and filmed project examples to provide the inspirational training content on the Field to School portal. Resources To help enable teachers to run projects in their own schools, over 50 resource sheets and films were created on the following topic areas: Enterprise; Farming; Growing; Food; Social and Digital project ideas. Field to School portal All the resources are on the freely accessible fieldtoschool.eu website and adapted and translated where required for use in all seven partner countries. The Project website has been uploaded to the Project Results Platform suggested content for School Education Gateway October 2020 topic of Project Based Learning. Dissemination The partners were involved in dissemination of the work of the Field to School programme throughout the duration of the project. This included information on websites, engagement with colleagues, presentations at events and conferences, promotion to other Erasmus projects, discussions with stakeholders and social media/press contact. These are reported further in the report, together with Multiplier Events that were hosted for key stakeholders. Results and Impact The partners have been able to learn from each other and embed the resources into their own programmes in each country, drawing on the resources for their physical and online training delivery.