Fürth, Germany. October 10th 2017. Around twenty people from fourteen organizations across Europe meet for the first time. Some have known each other for years. For others, this is their first encounter. But we are all here for the same reason: to build a bridge between education and social innovation. Welcome to NEMESIS kick-off meeting!
Fourteen partners, seven EU countries and one common goal: develop an educational model that brings social innovation mindset into schools. This is NEMESIS in a nutshell, an EU project bringing together school teachers, researchers and social innovators to collaboratively develop a new educational model towards the attainment of social innovation skills. The core idea is to create materials that will encourage students to become more socially aware and innovative.
How are we going to do that? NEMESIS educational model will combine innovative learning frameworks, open technologies, and participatory relations and processes to foster entrepreneurial mindsets and creative thinking amongst primary and secondary students. We will develop a pedagogical learning framework for social innovation and a ready-to-adapt methodology for use in schools and other educational settings. The model will then be tested by seven schools in four European countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece and France) from January to June 2019. A second pilot will take place from December 2019 to June 2020, which more schools are invited to join.
But, for now on we meet each other, organize workloads and plan the way for answering all the pressing questions we are going to face in the project: what are the teachers’ needs for the pilot schemes? How are we going to define social innovation? How are the schools going to organize the co-creation labs? How can parents, social innovators, and other stakeholders be stimulated to participate in them? How can we be sure schools from disadvantaged backgrounds are also able to participate in the project?
So much work to do! Don’t you all feel excited?
Oh, by the way: NEMESIS stands for «Novel Educational Model Enabling Social Innovations Skills». It is also the name of the Greek goddess for redistributive justice, Adrasteia, who maintained the balance between good and evil. Not a bad godmother for a project intending to prepare students to effect positive change in society.