How can the incorporation of democratic citizenship, entrepreneurial competences and social innovation practices in education contribute towards the empowerment of students as active citizens and drivers of positive social change?
Last week our partner Irene Kalemaki (from STIMMULI) participated together with Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard – co-founder of Learn to Change -in a webinar hosted by School Education Gateway (video at the bottom). Both Pascale and Irene outlined practical ways to co-work entrepreneurial, social, civic and cultural competences in education, and shone light on how the adoption of such processes can empower people to take action and achieve collective outcomes towards the creation of social value.
Pascale referenced two frameworks, the Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture and the European Commission’s Entrepreneurship Competence Framework, and then effectively forwarded a pedagogy in which learners become active participants in the decision-making processes of education and come to realise their potential to drive social transformations through the creation of financial, cultural or social value.
“The teacher of the 21st century has to move from a teaching focus to a learning focus” – Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard
These frameworks would have serious implications on school curricula and assessment practices, where rather than have a top-down, one-size-fits-all assessment, there would be a greater recognition of all degrees of competences. Under this model, skills such as cooperation, autonomous learning, empathy, adaptability, personal responsibility and critical understanding are recognised as important criteria in the formation of students.
How can a teacher begin to apply and understand this pedagogy for citizenship and entrepreneurial competences? By asking themselves questions such as “to what extent would you say your teaching contributes towards learners becoming active citizens/ respecting human rights?”; “How often do your students have an opportunity to express their own ideas/ listen to different views/ discuss differences in class?”; “How often are questions relevant to human rights, democratic citizenship, justice, equality or rule of law raised in class?”.
“Both education and social innovation have the same goal: to empower people to become active participants in the transformation of society”, Irene Kalemaki (NEMESIS)
Highly linked to the ideas expressed by Pascale of generating socio-political transformations through education, Irene Kalemaki introduced NEMESIS – our EU-funded project bringing together education and social innovation in the aim of empowering students to become future innovators and drivers of social change.
Acknowledging similar goals on both education and social innovation, NEMESIS represents an attempt to converge these two worlds through co-creation and collaboration so to find novel solutions to social problems, through ‘Social Innovation Education” (SIE), defined as “a collaborative and collective learning process for the empowerment of the socio-political activation of students to drive social change no matter their professional pathways” (mind you: definition-in-progress).
Including social innovation within education therefore has a high potential for socio-political transformation as it focuses not only on competences related to innovation and entrepreneurship, but also on individual and collective competences that can empower people to take action and achieve collective outcomes towards the creation of social value.
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You can watch the entire webinar here. And remember! Second NEMESIS pilot will be open to all schools interested, and is set to start in September 2019.