PHERECLOS

PHERECLOS programs “Transnational Education Mentoring Partnerships” and “Local Educational Clusters” are taking place in 16 countries over the world, developing and implementing learning partnerships in the Open Schooling context as pilot projects.

PHERECLOS is an EU-funded project to foster Open Schooling culture represented by the exchange of resources and ideas in the school environment relevant to local communities that can be incorporated into the teaching approaches and everyday school life. In return, schools provide the local community with the creativity and perspectives of their pupils and teachers as a valuable resource for society.

The Transnational Education Mentoring Partnerships TEMP program provides an opportunity to realize small-scale initiatives related to Open Schooling and mutual learning among mentoring partners in the framework of the PHERECLOS project. For the implementation of the TEMP projects, funding of 15.000 € for each mentoring partnership is provided.

10 TEMP partnerships were selected for the program, formed from 58 different institutions in 16 countries, including volunteers, charitable organizations, universities, children’s universities, and schools operating in different countries and cultural environments.

The partnerships bring together a wide diversity of cultures with complementary resources, within multinational teams such as Portugal-Spain, Austria-Spain-Netherlands, Germany-Greece, Poland-Ireland-Spain, Romania-Spain, Spain-Greece, Latvia-Denmark, Romania-Turkey, Hungary-Serbia, and Italy-Romania.

Another major element in the PHERECLOS project is the conception and implementation of Local Educational Clusters (LECs). They are intended as communities of practice and incubators of change in local education ecosystems based on Open Schooling and Science Capital.

The LECs are initiated by local or regional Children’s Universities (CU), which bring together children and universities. LECs puts schools at the centre of the collaboration to support sustainable partnerships between schools and universities.

LEC involves schools, universities and different stakeholders, e.g., NGOs, companies, and governmental organisations. They set activities based on topics of shared local interest and involve a variety of schools, from kindergarten to upper secondary levels. They collaboratively explore and deploy didactical concepts and approaches, from co-creation to problem-based learning, with a clear focus on an inclusive and gender-sensitive way of teaching and learning. In the long run, the insights from the LECs during the PHERECLOS project will be provided as a toolkit to be transferable to other communities.

A total of 6 LECs are implemented during the PHERECLOS project. They are located in Vienna (Austria), Kuopio (Finland), Lodz (Poland), Porto (Portugal), Trieste (Italy) and Medellin (Colombia).

Links

https://www.phereclos.eu/initiatives?paged=1

Keywords

open schooling, education, mentoring, partnerships