"<< Background >>The project SUNRAISE – Stem UNlimited Raise thanks to Arts at School in Europe is coordinated by Coop. Nazareno (IT) with 6 partners from CY, ES, GR, PL (out of them, 2 partners are secondary schools). The project aims to tackle a set of serious problems affecting education, young people and the cultural sector in Europe especially in times of the Covid-19 pandemic.The health emergency with its effects on the delivery of education and its restriction measures is cutting down young people’s chances to socialise and explore the real world, causing anxiety, isolation and web addictions. It is increasing inequalities in accessing distance learning for students with disadvantages (either socio-economic ones, disabilities, special educational needs) generally reducing the quality of learning and school achievements, with a risk of disengagement and dropout. This adds up to the already scarce performance and interest shown by EU students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), despite the key importance of these subjects to develop the necessary innovation to face contemporary challenges. Confronting the pandemic and the global crisis, it is necessary that young people learn to combine knowledge with interdisciplinary competences to solve problems, participate actively and responsibly in society, think critically and creatively, while at the moment they are more likely to be left behind.The risk is to grow a generation of people less prepared to face contemporary challenges.Such new issues and inequalities add up to existing weaknesses in education, particularly related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM): the EU recognized a shortfall in STEM knowledge in citizens and innovative educational approaches haven’t reached the expected improvements in this field. In 2018 around 20-22% of 15-year-old students underperformed in Maths and Science with different situations across countries: those represented in SUNRAISE have some of the lowest achievements in EU (EC “Education and Training Monitor 2019”).Considering this context, the SUNRAISE project will meet the needs of the primary and direct target groups that are the following ones:> Secondary school teachers, educators working in associations especially with disadvantaged young people, including disabilities, SEN, socio-economic problems. These target groups will be involved in an initial survey activity to analyse their needs and expectations (PR1): they will directly contribute to this activity giving expressing their feedbacks and needs linked to their daily work and practice. Then they will attend the training to learn delivering the newly developed educational programme on STEM and arts (PR3).> Secondary school students benefiting from the implementation of the programme on STEM and arts. These students (in particular including disadvantaged young people, students with disabilities, SEN and socio-economic problems) will participate to the testing phase (PR3) in which the newly developed SUNRAISE Innovative training programme for teaching STEM and scientific subjects through creative approaches will be applied and tested with students in the classrooms.<< Objectives >>SUNRAISE responds to this situation by developing a set of training tools for secondary school teachers and educators to teach STEM subjects combined with artistic techniques (e.g. Geometry and Music, Physics and Dance, Ecology and Theatre, etc).In order to face challenges like climate change, digital shift or health threats it is necessary that young people combine knowledge with interdisciplinary competences to solve problems, participate actively and responsibly in society, think critically and creatively. In this context, cultural and creative sector can give a unique contribution in developing ways of bridging creativity and arts with educational approaches. This approach will be even more effective for students with disabilities/SEN as the use of creativity and visual languages will improve their learning process even in difficult subjects such as science.Considering the actual context, the project objectives are:>To improve teaching’s quality through innovative and alternative didactics that enrich STEM teaching with different artistic expressions, facilitating inclusive and participatory learning>To integrate formal education with non-formal education by professional artists and artists with disabilities, letting cultural and creative organisations play an active role in the recovery by starting new collaborations with the education sector to build a resilient society>To help teachers develop their skills regarding STEM and creativity fostering creative thinking and sense of initiative, useful to find innovative solutions to individual and collective challenges>To help students, including students with disabilities, SEN and/or social and economic disadvantage, to handle the pandemic social and emotional repercussions through new opportunities of self-expression exploring contamination between STEM and arts> to foster students’ awareness, relational and communication skills and their ability to think out of the box.<< Implementation >>The SUNRAISE project will start in February 2022 with the Kick Off meeting organized in Carpi (IT) by the Lead Partner, with the participation of all the partners. It will be aimed at establishing administrative, financial and organizational arrangements, analysing project phases, results and activities, planning monitoring and evaluation mechanisms (Monitoring and Evaluation plan will be discussed), defining dissemination strategies and activities (dissemination and exploitation plan will be discussed & how to define the dissemination and exploitation team). Planning of the activities for starting the work on PR1 that will begin in the following months: a specific session for each of them be set up.On the first month, the work on the PR1 Analysis of the achievement of STEM skills in EU and the need for a more interactive approach will start: initial analysis of the current situation in partner countries regarding STEM achievements by students and education methodologies in place, including best practices, and investigation of teachers’ and education professionals’ needs in terms of skills development and innovative teaching.In parallel will begin also the preparation of PR2 E-learning platform as a ""virtual classroom"" for training teachers and students: the platform will host all training materials and will be open for piloting and free use also after the project end.In M6 and M8 will start the preparation of the last 2 PRs: PR3 SUNRAISE innovative training programme for teaching STEM and scientific subjects through creative approaches; the programme will consist in modules, each combining 1 STEM subject with specific art techniques and represents an innovative methodology to build curiosity and engagement, practical and creative thinking, with a special added value for students with learning and social difficulties or disabilities. The modules will be piloted by each partner in at least 10 lessons/training sessions in secondary schools. 3 partners will pilot the training specifically with students with disabilities/SEN.For the joint work on PR3 will be very important the C1 organized in Spain by ESCIENCIA in which all the partners’ staff (at least 2-3 persons) will actively participate for developing the contents of the modules, as the online training will be tested at local level in the following months. In coincidence with the C1, the 2nd transnational project meeting will be set up exploiting the presence of all the partners, in order to monitor the ongoing project activities.Finally, PR4 SUNRAISE e-book will bring together all the research, pilots, learning and main findings of the project.In order to discuss and monitor all the ongoing activities, the 3rd transnational project meeting will be organized in Poland in M16-17 by ICIMSS and the final meeting will be set up in Greece in M23-24 by THE.AM.A. It will be aimed at evaluating project activities, outcomes, impact; discussing about and planning of future exploitation activities. PR2, PR3, PR4 will be delivered and presented. Local stakeholders and policy makers will be invited to participate in order to have their feedback about the final results of the project.In the last 7 months of the project, 5 national multiplier events will be organized in IT, ES, GR, PL, CY with the participation of local and national stakeholders for the school education sector, so to mainstream and promote the project results delivered during the SUNRAISE project, find other possible interested partners for the results’ sustainability and transferability, find other possible funds and opportunities for the further exploitation of results even after the project end.<< Results >>The main project outcomes are linked to the activities implemented during the project that are 4 project results, 1 LTT event and 5 multiplier events: >PR1 Analysis of the achievement of STEM skills in EU and the need for a more interactive approach>PR2 E-Learning platform as a ""virtual classroom"" for training teachers and students>PR3 SUNRAISE innovative training programme for teaching STEM & scientific subjects through creative approaches>PR4 SUNRAISE eBookLTTA organized in ES in M9-10, with the participation of 19 teachers.5 multiplier events will be organized at the national level to disseminate SUNRAISE project activities and results to the relevant stakeholders as to transfer and exploit project results.PARTICIPANTS DIRECTLY INVOLVED – TOTAL 720- participants in the Online Questionnaire – 210 (30 per partner)- participants in the Focus Groups – 140 (20 per partner)- participants in the Piloting the first prototype of the SUNRAISE innovative training programme – 70 (10 per partner) - participants in the national multipliers – 300PARTICIPANTS INDIRECTLY INVOLVED – ESTIMATED 1.000 – Schools- Youth Centers- Informal & non formal training & education centres- Students- NGOs- Cultural & artistic associations - EU level organizations- Youth training companies- OtherThe project impact and expected results on the actors directly and indirectly participating in the SUNRAISE activities will be: - an increased interest of students in STEM subjects and stronger inclination to undertake STEM studies and careers; - Improved teaching’s quality through innovative & alternative didactics that will foster the methodology of STEM teaching through artistic approaches;- increased inclusivity and appeal of STEM teaching, either in presence and at distance, addressing the needs of every student including those with a disability or difficult background or SEN; - increased students’ capacity to think in an interdisciplinary way and put in place creative solutions to complex and/or abstract problems, increased teachers’ capacity to engage students and reach out to them in a fruitful way;- Increased empowerment, higher inclusion and active participation of students, fighting the sense of isolation and fragmentation caused by Covid19 emergency.The project impact extends to the cultural and creative sector as well, offering new collaboration opportunities among these organisations, schools, education and youth organisations, helping the arts to recover from the hard hit of the pandemic and find a new role across disciplines and real world applications. In general the project builds resilience of local communities against the multiple effects of the global crisis that threatens our cohesion, the trust in our future and our capacity to move on in a sustainable way."

The economic downturn of the last years has impacted youth and adult populations throughout Europe. A major concern is the rise in unemployment and prevailing lack of opportunities to develop and improve skills of EU citizens. The EU Strategy acknowledges that education and training can help tackle key challenges, while the cultural sector is becoming more and more one of the key successful elements of new forms of socio-economic development. The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for:- enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions;- creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.The background context from which the project originates, comes from the mass digitisation process in the field of cultural heritage, that made available the huge amount of contents in European galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Despite its enormous potential (about 60 million items are included in Europeana), browsing the records interesting for the students to perform learning tasks is strongly limited by shortage of metadata describing the cultural objects themselves. E.g., if you look for paintings depicting a renaissance landscape, and the descriptors of Mona Lisa are only “Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre”, this record will be never displayed, thus frustrating the student experience.To overcome this problem, the CrowdHeritage project created an online tool using the power of crowdsourcing (i.e. the joint effort of students who collectively annotate a picture with its key characteristics) to improve quality of metadata and increase the fruition. Some schools have been already involved in 2019 in the piloting phase, however it is time now to start using the platform in a more structured way.The training model proposed by the CrowdSchool project consists of different steps: 1) teachers select some themes of their interest, according to the mission of their school; 2) cultural professionals identify digital collections interesting for preparing lessons, researches, workshops focusing on those themes; 3) jointly the teams work together for defining the terminology to be used for describing the collections for that specific theme. The terminology is translated in different languages, in order to retrieve an item also if it has been annotated in a language different from the one of the users performing the inquiry; 4) the students start the annotation campaign, enriching in a creative way the educational content of the collections, and making them available also to all the students who in future will perform a similar query; 5) annotations done by the students of each school will be also revised by another class of a different country, encouraging in this way the development of critical thinking capacity in the revisers’ group, who will be requested to justify the reason for the non-acceptance of the proposed annotations. All the process will be organised according to a gamification scheme, in order to provide higher scores to the pupils who are more creative in the annotation process and whose tags were less subject to the critical revision of their peers; 6) finally, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system and pave the way to further annotation campaigns, the students more effective in the first pilot action will become the mentors of their younger colleagues of the following school year, supporting them in the annotation and validation process on a different educational theme.The key results expected by the CrowdSchool project are:- training teachers to use the CrowdHeritage tools;- customizing training materials to the purposes of targeted educational communities, using digital culture heritage to respond to their specific training objective;- acquiring Key Competences, through a creative and critical thinking approach;- promoting co-creation and collaboration of teachers/children with cultural heritage organisations;- increasing awareness of the European teachers community on the relevance of creative and critical thinking capacity, using an interdisciplinary approach combining science and humanities.The project brings together ten partners from six countries and four of them have worked together in CrowdHeritage. The partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.