Nurturing Creativity Project
At a critical point for Europe when COVID19’s impact on the creative and cultural sectors has been unprecedented, up-to-date pan-European tools that empower the young and new generations to be creative are needed. To overcome the pandemic’s health and socio-economic impacts, innovation and creativity must be employed in all that we do. Creativity is necessary to inventive thinking in any domain, but under-appreciated in many formal educational environments. All solution making and construction require creative thinking. Yet, almost no school teach creativity or train teachers to teach creativity. Creativity is fundamental to human thought development and survival. Creativity theories are important in supporting instruction and learning, and elevation of teacher understanding and learning design. As the economic gap is widening due to the pandemic creativity can act as a key engineer for facilitating social harmony, sustainable human development, technological invention and scientific revolution.
Restoring Power will respond to this need. It will bring together 7 diverse organisations from the UK, Turkey, Norway, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, and Malta to form a strategic partnership that will empower schools to pursue creative education with their young people. Responding to Covid19 challenges, our project’s main objective is to deliver the Erasmus HORIZONTAL priority of Skills Development and Inclusion through creativity and the arts.
The key objectives of the project:
1. To equip young people and adults with the necessary tools and competences needed to come up with creative and innovative solutions to face unprecedented risks and societal challenges;
2. To train teachers/educators in the use of new methods and tools related to creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship;
3. To strength the profiles of the teaching professions, including teachers, school leaders and teacher educators through enhancing teachers’ professional development and supporting teachers in collaborative and innovative practices;
4. To enhance skills development and competences that reinforce creativity;
5. To develop students’ creativity and awareness of their own culture, as well as get familiar with the cultural diversity of Europe;
6. To create and investigate an artifact, such as creating study skills resources, presentations, media messages, and cultural artifacts;
7. To encouraging dynamic thinking through varying scenarios, showcasing multiple solutions, and considering mind expansive concepts.
7 Organisations working on educational subjects from UK, Turkey, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Ireland and Italy have come together to establish this consortium. Around 25 teachers and trainers will directly take part in this project; furthermore, 100 more teachers and trainers will involve the project indirectly. The target groups of the project are students, teachers, headmasters and trainers.
3 Transnational Project Meetings, 7 multiplier events and 3 LTT meetings will be held during 24 months period. Moreover 4 Intellectual Outputs (Guidance, MOOC, Handbook and Toolkit) will be developed and carried out during the project period. For students and parents we will develop new learning material and tools. For teachers we will develop a new course about fostering creativity in education, which delivers a teaching approach relevant to all teaching subjects. With a new course we will improve in-service training. However, the course will be also suitable for initial education of teachers, therefore we will also disseminate it to universities. By creativity project, we will foster new forms of learning by real life cases, virtual mobility, coaching and flipped classroom.
Dissemination will be aligned with the key stages of the project. The purpose of our dissemination is raise awareness in creativity, inform about teaching based on creativty approach, engage in creativty activities and communication, and promote using projects’ intellectual outputs.
The dissemination tools include; partners’ websites; partners’ social media accounts with more than 20.000 followers altogether including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram; one of the international MOOC platform; newsletter every 3 months; email marketing with more than 10.000 contacts altogether; media articles, at least 10 articles in different countries etc.
With this project we aim to form long lasting, sustainable results. We carefully planned what is needed to develop creativity at schools. In order to assure sustainability of this, it is inevitable to include parents, principals and school staff, not only students and teachers. All of the project’s results address real needs of the teachers, which were identified in the previous project. For that reason, it is more likely for teachers to use the project results.
For further information please look up our website: https://restoringpower.org/