At a critical point for Europe when COVID19's impact on the creative and cultural sectors has been unprecedented, up-to-date pan-European tools that empower the young and new generations to be creative are needed. To overcome the pandemic's health and socio-economic impacts, innovation and creativity must be employed in all that we do. Creativity is necessary to inventive thinking in any domain, but under-appreciated in many formal educational environments. All solution making and construction require creative thinking. Yet, almost no school teach creativity or train teachers to teach creativity. Creativity is fundamental to human thought development and survival. Creativity theories are important in supporting instruction and learning, and elevation of teacher understanding and learning design. As the economic gap is widening due to the pandemic creativity can act as a key engineer for facilitating social harmony, sustainable human development, technological invention and scientific revolution. Restoring Power will respond to this need. It will bring together 7 diverse organisations from the UK, Turkey, Norway, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, and Malta to form a strategic partnership that will empower schools to pursue creative education with their young people. Responding to Covid19 challenges, our project's main objective is to deliver the Erasmus HORIZONTAL priority of Skills Development and Inclusion through creativity and the arts. The key objectives of the project; 1. To equip young people and adults with the necessary tools and competences needed to come up with creative and innovative solutions to face unprecedented risks and societal challenges; 2. To train teachers/educators in the use of new methods and tools related to creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship; 3. To strength the profiles of the teaching professions, including teachers, school leaders and teacher educators through enhancing teachers’ professional development and supporting teachers in collaborative and innovative practices; 4. To enhance skills development and competences that reinforce creativity; 5. To develop students’ creativity and awareness of their own culture, as well as get familiar with the cultural diversity of Europe; 6. To create and investigate an artifact, such as creating study skills resources, presentations, media messages, and cultural artifacts; 7. To encouraging dynamic thinking through varying scenarios, showcasing multiple solutions, and considering mind expansive concepts. 7 Organisations working on educational subjects from UK, Turkey, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Ireland and Italy have come together to establish this consortium. Around 25 teachers and trainers will directly take part in this project; furthermore, 100 more teachers and trainers will involve the project indirectly. The target groups of the project are students, teachers, headmasters and trainers. 3 Transnational Project Meetings, 7 multiplier events and 3 LTT meetings will be held during 24 months period. Moreover 4 Intellectual Outputs (Guidance, MOOC, Handbook and Toolkit) will be developed and carried out during the project period. For students and parents we will develop new learning material and tools. For teachers we will develop a new course about fostering creativity in education, which delivers a teaching approach relevant to all teaching subjects. With a new course we will improve in-service training. However, the course will be also suitable for initial education of teachers, therefore we will also disseminate it to universities. By creativity project, we will foster new forms of learning by real life cases, virtual mobility, coaching and flipped classroom. Dissemination will be aligned with the key stages of the project. The purpose of our dissemination is raise awareness in creativity, inform about teaching based on creativty approach, engage in creativty activities and communication, and promote using projects’ intellectual outputs. The dissemination tools include; partners’ websites; partners' social media accounts with more than 20.000 followers altogether including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram; one of the international MOOC platform; newsletter every 3 months; email marketing with more than 10.000 contacts altogether; media articles, at least 10 articles in different countries etc. With this project we aim to form long lasting, sustainable results. We carefully planned what is needed to develop creativity at schools. In order to assure sustainability of this, it is inevitable to include parents, principals and school staff, not only students and teachers. All of the project's results address real needs of the teachers, which were identified in the previous project. For that reason, it is more likely for teachers to use the project results.
The partnership’s goals were to make an impact on fostering creativity in educational settings especially when COVID19's impact on the creative and cultural sectors has been unprecedented. This underlined the need for up-to-date pan-European tools that empower the young and new generations to be creative are needed. The focus was not only on students and teachers but also on parents, principals and school staff as it could be beneficial for them too on how to enhance skills development and competences that reinforce creativity. To achieve this, a partnership 6 Erasmus countries was created to develop educational materials and learning tools for professionals and young people regarding creative teaching methods, strategies on how to nurture creativity in schools and ways to overcome challenges in implementation. We are pleased to report that our original target groups are now equipped with the necessary tools and competences needed to come up with creative and innovative solutions. Restoring power managed to strength the profiles of the teaching professions, including teachers, school leaders and teacher educators through enhancing teachers’ professional development and supporting teachers in collaborative and innovative practices. The project achieved to disseminate not only challenges faced during educational creative methods implementation but also how to address and overcome these. Last, the project significantly made impact on students’ creativity and awareness of their own culture, as well as they got familiar with the cultural diversity of Europe. It also encouraged them increase their dynamic thinking not only as a result of the project related situations, but also on real-life situations.
Creativity is a necessary tool to face and overcome challenges that need a different and more inventive thinking, especially in a period of time following a global pandemic. We believe that creativity can act as a key engineer for facilitating social harmony, sustainable human development, technological invention and scientific revolution. All solution making and construction require creative thinking. However, creative thinking is under-appreciated in many formal educational environments. There is a big enough number of schools in Europe that do not teach creativity or train teachers to teach creativity. Based on research findings from all project’s participating countries (UK, Ireland, Norway, Malta, and Turkey) all of them reported that although the importance of creativity in education programs is underlined, the respective methods are not implemented in the curriculum due to reasons such as complying with the structured program, lack of flexibility, limited timeline, etc. Additionally, in other case, some educators seem to be unaware of the type of positive life-enhancing benefits that can come from utilizing creativity-based activities and lessons. The Restoring power partnership came together to address some of these challenges by creating a good source of online information and learning tool for professionals and young people regarding creative teaching methods, strategies on how to nurture creativity in schools and ways to overcome challenges in implementation. Restoring power focused on exchanging its results at national and European levels, helping in this way to achieve the project's main objective which is to deliver the Erasmus HORIZONTAL priority of Skills Development and Inclusion through creativity and the arts. The partnership considers creativity in education to be of high importance considering that it is also fundamental to human thought development and survival. The focus is on involve young people of all levels of education: primary, secondary, high-school, as well as on adults. In terms of restorative justice as an approach to nurture creativity, restorative justice can promote creative thinking. Restorative practices emphasize values of empathy, respect, honesty, acceptance, and accountability among participants. These values are necessary for people to feel comfortable and safe in an environment in order to be able to focus on other domains and feel free to share ideas and innovative thoughts. There is a small yet growing body of empirical research into the implementation and effectiveness of restorative justice in school settings. While they do not directly show the link between restorative practices and creativity, they do demonstrate that they are effective in establishing a social learning environment that can have long-term benefits. Restorative justice can if implemented correctly improve the school environment, enhance learning. Thus, the partnership has integrated the practices and values of restorative justice into the educational materials created during the project lifetime holding a valuable role on the project’s impact.