Background: In 2015 began a large migration process in large parts of the EU. Many countries and education systems were challenged, and had different ways of creating intercultural competence. The need for this became a most important educational perspective and was emphasized in international agreements by the UN, UNESCO and the Council. Two of the EU’s eight key competences is about this. All educational programs within the EU tells us that respect for the individual, diversity, openness and tolerance towards other cultures must be stated as major objectives and an ambition to live together with in our global, multicultural complex world. The need to exchange and share experiences is crucial on issues regarding the mapping of the student’s previous school experiences, learning processes based om previous school experience, the methodology of work and the guidance to inclusion. The project aimed to increase the knowledge of the participating countries, England, Belgium and Sweden.Objectives: ORGANIZATIONS WITH COMPETENCE TO EFFECTIVELY SUPPORT YOUNG NEWCOMERS TO BE INCLUDED IN EDUCATION OR TRAININGFour development objectives: To share our experience around the Mapping /screening process, Initial learning processes, Methodology/tools used and the Guidance provided. Participating organisations: The Local School Authority of Helsingborg with about 4000 employees and offers preschool, primary school, lower and upper secondary school and free-time arrangements to about 20 000 young children and students. The educational center is a supportive department of this Authority. In 2014 the Department got a mission to develop the mapping of newly arrived children and young people's previous school experiences. Kent County Council is a large local authority in the South East corner of England. It has responsibility for a number of public services such as education, transport, strategic planning, social services, public safety and waste disposal. With a staff workforce of nearly 20 000 people it is also one of the largest employers in the county.AGSO, Antwerp is the general service organizing the Community Education in the city of Antwerp.It consists of 5 big divisions and in total the AGSO has about 55 000 students and 6545 teachers and other employees. Antwerp is a city of 510 000 inhabitants and about 165 nationalities entailing all the complexities and challenges of diversity. GO! Brussels is responsible for providing community education in Dutch speaking Belgium on behalf of the Flemish community. GO! is one of the three main educational networks in Flanders. GO! provides education from nursery school, through compulsory school age through to adult education and including schools and provides curriculum development and teacher training for staff in its 773 schools for 27 000 members of staff serving 200 000 students.Description of activities: The project processed four themes as part of the action of bringing the newcomer into the school system of the receiving country. Starting with a transnational training event of one week, on to a project meeting, finally four local training and dissemination events, the themes were explored to find good practice in the ongoing work. During each training event each partner organized a mix of shadowing, discussion, filming of good practice, SWOT analysis, GLL reflection and report writing in the group. This report was brought back to the steering group to be used in the next project meeting and to be presented by one of the group members. The project meetings were built around theoretical input by researchers, reports from the transnational training event, input from the hosting partner on the current theme and lead to dialogue on what will be wise start doing or keep on doing in the ongoing work. The local training and dissemination events disseminated findings from the project meeting to a wider group of staff and stakeholders. Results and impact:1:Encourage the use of trans language and provide support in mother-tongue/strongest language in all learning and guidance processes. 2:Encourage the creation of multi-disciplinary teams around schools to support newcomers. 3:Encourage the exchange and the adaptation of existing methods and approaches on an EU-level via open licenses and networks.4:Encourage comprehensive and long-term guidance in order to improve learning pathways, integration and wellbeing of the newcomer.5:A methodological result. The concise planning of the different work phases presented in the description of activities was a factor of success for the project. Out of this the “Policy recommendations” brochure is created by the steering group. Long term benefits: When stakeholders and policymakers agree on the results presented in the “Policy recommendations”, and start organising work according to this, it will give young newcomers more opportunity to participate in inclusive education. It also will strengthen the teaching profession.

<< Objectives >>With TACT we want to: improve competences of SE educators; improve learners resilience and active social engagement; come up with a model for teaching competences for active citizenship and information literacy; provide high-quality teaching support and digital learning resources; produce comprehensive learning lines for the two priority domains and map them across the target curriculum and establish the possible training intervention points alongside the continuous curriculum progression.<< Implementation >>We plan to: design learning lines template; map information literacy and active citizenship learning lines across the pilot curriculum; determine training intervention points across the curriculum; design digital impact visualiser tool (IMPACTO); run learners and teachers survey on engaging topics; produce learning resources for information literacy and active citizenship; develop teaching strategies; produce webapp; run demonstration event in Antwerp; conduct 3 partner cooperation workshops.<< Results >>Expected results: practical and actionable definitions for information literacy and active citizenship; detailed and well-structured lists of competences for them; review of existing measures and interventions; IMPACTO visualisation tool; list of topics identified by survey of learners and teachers; a template for learning lines with competence levels and level descriptors; mapping across the curriculum with defined trained intervention points; collection of resources; new teaching strategies.

Short summarywww.teachstem.eu is an initiative developed under the ARTIFEX project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the EU. Its aim is to provide support and resources for STEM teachers to improve their practices and methodologies, further the specific STEM partnerships at schools and communities, and provide insights to policy makers with regard to the existing models and the challenges we all face in re-shaping our education and training systems and strengthening them with STEM-competences.Description.STEM is a very large field of work and exploration. With the ARTIFEX project and through the learning platform (see link above), the project attempts to help educators identify their personal strengths and weaknesses with regard to teaching STEM, and to assist them in improving their skills and competences by providing ready-to-use practical workshops. The learning platform offers the following components.Self-assessment tool for teachers and educatorsOur ARTIFEX SAT was built and tested by university researchers of Antwerp University and Karlstad University and it helps teachers and practitioners who wish to integrate STEM in their classes and workshops better understand their strengths and weaknesses with regard to teaching STEM in relation to the 21st Century Skills. Based on a short questionnaire, the tool will recommend personalized workshop scripts and instructions tailored to the specific competences and activity areas which an educator chooses to improve. This tool is available in different languages.WorkshopsDevelopers in Belgium (Stedelijk Onderwijs Antwerpen and Artevelde Hogeschool), Italy (H-Farm), Sweden (Karlstad University, teacher learning department), Greece (Ellinogermanika Agogi) have designed and tested a collection of STEM workshops. Each workshop comes with a set of instructions - difficulty level, group size, materials, activities, timing. All workshops were peer reviewed and tested on their impact by several dozen European schools. Their comments and additions have been included in the workshops as inspiring practices for their colleague teachers. STEM is a fun way for students to learn an important set of skills and be better prepared for their future workplace. With the help of the Assessment Tool and workshops, teachers can improve their competences. Best practices, some ideas for policy makersSuccessful STEM education typically requires cooperation between schools, teachers, students, local authorities and communities, and the business. The University of Antwerp has collected on www.teachstem.eu interesting cooperation models from different EU countries to help policy makers understand the variety of possibilities when designing STEM policies on a local or a regional level. InsightsRead what people who currently hold STEM-related occupations say about their work, their vision for the future of their jobs and sectors, and the challenges ahead for education. Or go to www.teachstem.eu to read about the ARTIFEX research. In a collaboration between the University of Antwerp and the University of Karlstad, Belgian and Swedish teachers were asked about their feelings of competence, and their concerns regarding working in a high-tech informal learning environment.ReachAll elements of the tool and project are freely available on the learning platform www.teachstem.eu

<< Background >>ALiCE stands for ‘Assessment for Learning in Citizenship Education’; an Erasmus+ project that entails to portray the benefit of a formative approach of assessment in order to assess citizenship competences.There is a variety of frameworks when it comes to citizenship competences and how they can be evaluated. Within the context of the Green Deal, the European Commission has called for a European framework for ‘Green Competences for lifelong learning’. What unifies these frameworks is their common focus on the active role of young people in society. In order to become active citizens, schools and teachers have to give students opportunities in order to develop citizenship competences in diverse contexts (home, school, local community …). Allowing students to reflect and critically assess connections within these contexts can help them to take action related to national and global issues.Diverse interpretations of citizenship education exist across and within European members states. Due to its wide range of curricular objectives and diverse contexts in which it is taught and learned, citizenship education challenges teachers and schools to integrate it in the curriculum. Teachers struggle to design learning activities and assess if students are learning citizenship competences. In particular, there is a need for assessment methods that captures the complexity of citizenship education and its multifaceted competences. An important innovation in this area would therefore be to map and develop specific tools and methods that are used to assess these citizenship competences. The main focus lies on a formative approach of assessment by making the learning process visible. Formative assessment is strongly connected with the principles of citizenship education, since it relies on a shared understanding of the learning outcomes targeted by citizenship. The role of the teacher then lies in setting clear goals and designing effective learning situations and classroom activities in order to achieve the citizenship competences. Furthermore, teachers can create opportunities for students to receive feedback that drives the learning process. It is important to activate students as instructional resources for one another (peer assessment) and to reflect on their own learning (self-assessment) within the formative framework of assessment. However, to ensure the quality of monitoring students’ learning progress, teachers need to thoughtfully plan formative assessment. They should know which dimension (knowledge, skills and attitudes) of citizenship competences they are trying to measure. This seems to be particularly challenging for teachers, as they are unfamiliar with the multiple dimensions of these competences. Previous research revealed that the knowledge dimension is mostly covered in assessment, but attitudes and skills are evaluated far less. A clear assessment framework for citizenship education could support teachers in this process. However, such framework, with specific assessment tools, is not widespread in educational practice. This is partly due to the complexity of citizenship and the unfamiliarity with it in educational practice. Another issue is that assessing citizenship competences is context-dependent. In this respect, an assessment framework should contain guiding principles for teachers to use the framework in their own context-specific environment.<< Objectives >>In the ALiCE Erasmus+ KA 2 project, we propose the collaborative development of a framework for assessment, with a main focus on formative assessment, in the context of citizenship education across Europe. We focus on screening the diversity of how citizenship education is integrated into local curricula, which learning goals are put forward, and how assessment practices are and can be used to facilitate learning in citizenship education. Innovative practices for (formative assessment in) citizenship education are being developed across Europe. A next step in this domain is therefore to unlock academic knowledge about formative assessment in the context of citizenship education, to connect these to practical knowledge of assessment practices and strengthen the capacity across Europe through collaboration.<< Implementation >>ALiCE contains 4 interconnected results. Each result contains a number of activities that are required to achieve the presupposed project results.Result 1 (European perspectives on assessment in citizenship education) contains panel talks with teachers, editing the results of these talks, writing a format for identifying learning goals on a country-based level, identifying learning goals for each country on citizenship education and key design principles for the development of the intellectual outputs 2, 3 and 4, writing a publication on the definitions of the key concepts of the project. Result 2 (Inventory of innovative educational practices in citizenship education) entails writing a framework in order to define and describe practices on formative assessment and citizenship education, identifying in each country these practices, collecting information on the practices in order to infuse them into the framework, editing them in a format that is ready to be published on a learning platform.Result 3 (Repository of contextualized formative assessment methods in citizenship education) requires the making of a format to describe assessment methods in a different context, identifying examples of assessment methods in a different context using the format, making the bridge to citizenship education, designing a training to be given to all school partners, training the trainer, coaching of schools to implement their action plans and bring formative assessment in the context of citizenship education into practice within their classroom / school context, collecting feedback from teachers, making a format for publishing the outcomes on the learning platform.Result 4 (Sustainability and viability) makes an analysis of potential educational policies per country, contains a publication with recommendations for local, national or European policies or practices, creates a self-reflection tool for teachers in order to scan their own situation that will be evaluated and refined by teachers, creates a MOOC interactive course for multiplication of ALiCE’s designed training modules, provides the platform with instructional text and videos, and finally, the learning platform will be updated and brought online.<< Results >>We focus for ALiCE on producing four interconnected project results: -a framework that takes a comparative perspective on (assessment in) citizenship education across member states in Europe (IO1);-an inventory of innovative educational practices in citizenship education with a focus on the operationalization of assessment (IO2);-a repository of methods for formative assessment that we adapt for usage within citizenship education and prime towards local contextualization (IO3);-a roadmap to support school teams with implementing formative assessment in citizenship education (IO4).In order to achieve aforementioned intellectual outputs, we collaborate with about 45 associated schools all over Europe.In result 1, we provide some distinct deliverables: a publication on the definitions of the key concepts in the project (formative assessment, citizenship education …), an overview of learning goals for citizenship education, and a survey to identify the main challenges and needs for teachers when designing, implementing and evaluating citizenship education. Based on these insights we are able to identify key design principles needed for the development of results 2,3 and 4.In result 2, we provide a modus operandi for describing and sharing innovative educational practices of citizenship education, including the role evaluation plays within them, as well as illustrating how these examples are embedded within their local context. We build a framework in order to define and describe good practices within the educational field. These innovative educational practices will be placed in an online open-access inventory.In result 3, we select and describe assessment methods as they are used in other contexts than citizenship education and transform them into tools that can be used within citizenship education. We start off by collecting generic examples of formative assessment methods for learning skills and illustrate how they can be used in the context of citizenship education. Each partner will implement contextualized versions of these assessment methods in their network of schools. Participants will be trained to apply the assessment methods and provide feedback to students. Based on the experiences of the teachers and other stakeholders during these try outs, the assessment methods will be enriched and specified. In result 4, we focus on work that supports the sustainability and viability of the project results. A learning platform stimulate and inspire users to experiment with novel assessment methods on Citizenship Education. We make recommendations for local, national and European educational policies and practices. Also, we create an online self-reflection tool that allows teachers to scan their own situation. The same tool allows teachers to select methods of assessment and practices that are most suitable for them, given their particular context. Users will be supported in the implementation by an interactive online MOOC training.