In a world that is changing faster than ever, the needs of learners also change rapidly. Unlike common practices of the past, reproducing successfully content knowledge is not enough. Students need to be able to extrapolate and apply knowledge to new and different situations. Skills like critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, communication and collaboration are more important than ever. Student-centered approaches like inquiry learning have proved their effectiveness when it comes to developing students’ key skills and competences. These combined with interdisciplinary learning can greatly increase students’ knowledge retention, their critical thinking skills and their ability to combine facts and pieces of knowledge coming from different disciplines and apply them to new learning environments and contexts. Moreover, as the demands of today’s societies are strongly dependent on the advancement of science and technology, it is essential that students not only leave school with the proper skills to successfully innovate in such fields but also develop an understanding of the role of science in society and our everyday life and develop an appreciation of what science offers to the world through contemporary science achievements. POLAR STAR aims to bring together state-of-the-art learning pedagogies and combine them with exciting activities that focus on contemporary science, thus helping teachers to introduce STEAM successfully in their class. At the same time the project will focus on the development of students’ key skills and competences as well as deepening their knowledge of fundamental science principles, increasing their appreciation of science and technology and their role in todays’ societies. Our project will produce a methodology which will be comprised of two main strands; one about introducing student-centred learning approaches that focuses on developing students’ skills and competences, and one about introducing the ‘Science as a whole’ idea which promotes interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary learning. The project team will combine innovative learning techniques like inquiry learning and the design thinking approach along with other cutting-edge educational tools into one seamless methodology, that will allow teachers to shift towards a student-centred type of teaching. In addition, teachers will be able to learn how to introduce interdisciplinary learning into their class using an advanced cross-disciplinary methodology that goes beyond the traditional organization of science curricula and allows teachers and students to make connections between science disciplines and discover underlying connections between phenomena. To introduce contemporary science into the science classroom, POLAR STAR will focus on two main scientific areas, polar research and astronomy. Although both fields of research have contributed greatly to the advancement of science and are directly linked to our everyday life and the development of societies, they are usually not seen as science disciplines with real impact on our lives and are largely left out of science curricula. However, both areas are enormously interdisciplinary and exciting for students (girls and boys alike) and thus make ideal vehicles to teach other sciences, very often considered less appealing, showcasing how such fields of research that might seem irrelevant to people’s needs have in fact a great impact on our lives. The project team aims to implement POLAR STAR activities in 7 European countries and record schools’ achievements using the ‘My world of knowledge’ portfolios. The project aims to reach 140 teachers and 1750 students through training and implementation as well as 2500 teachers through dissemination events. To achieve that, the project aims to make numerous presentations and workshops in conferences and other related events reaching not only teachers but also educational stakeholders.
POLAR STAR aimed to bring innovative practices in a digital era, support educators and strengthen the profile of their profession by introducing meaningful educational tools and materials as well as state-of-the art methodologies. Through our methodology and activities we also aimed to help students deepen their understanding about fundamental science concepts and increase their appreciation of Science while at the same time developing their 21st century skills and competencies. To achieve these goals, the project developed an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary STEAM approach for teaching science, providing all the necessary tools and materials (including training materials) for teachers to fully implement it in their class. Our educational activities are in the fields of space exploration and arctic research and they focus on contemporary science achievements and topics related to our everyday life.
POLAR STAR was submitted under the ‘Open education and innovative practices in a digital era’ horizontal priority. It also addresses the priorities of 'Strengthening the profiles of the teaching professions’ and ‘Supporting education’. Our aim when applying was to focus on delivering tools for teachers and students to address these priorities while keeping in mind that unlike the common practices of the past, reproducing successfully content knowledge is not enough. In addition, our team also recognized that it is more important than ever for students to be able to extrapolate and apply knowledge to new and different situations making use of skills like critical thinking, problem solving, decision-making, communication and collaboration. Our rationale was to make use of student-centered approaches like inquiry learning that have proved their effectiveness when it comes to developing students’ key skills and competences and extend these approaches to tailor them even better to schools’ needs by combining them with interdisciplinary learning. It is our belief that such a combination can greatly increase students’ knowledge retention, their critical thinking skills and their ability to combine facts and pieces of knowledge coming from different disciplines and apply them to new learning environments and contexts. Finally, as the demands of today’s societies are strongly dependent on the advancement of science and technology, our team also took into consideration the need for students to have a better understanding about the role that science and technology play in our everyday life. It is essential that students not only leave school with the proper skills to successfully innovate in such fields, but also develop an understanding about the role of science in society and our everyday life, and develop an appreciation of what science offers to the world through contemporary science achievements. This is why our team decided to focus this project on Arctic research and Space exploration. These fields have a big impact on our everyday life, they are strongly related to addressing contemporary society challenges, and are appealing to students of all ages and genders. However, they are quite underrepresented in school curricula and the connection mentioned above is far from clear to students. Thus, it is our belief that these two scientific fields could be ideal vehicles to address the aforementioned need and bring contemporary science and science achievements in the school science class.