Abstract:

In the history of education there are many examples of innovations that emerged in underprivileged environments (from Jean Piaget to Paulo Freire, etc.) and even today there are many schools in challenging environments that perform best practices. But not all schools succeed. Some manage to improve the performance of their students, but have not yet managed to break the barrier of segregation, which condemns the school to have a high concentration of students from vulnerable families. Although innovations in disadvantaged schools will hardly end up with all educational inequalities, they can help in many ways: opening the school to its environment, empowering students to become global citizens, etc.

Inventeurs is an Erasmus+ project born from the collaboration of schools and universities from four different European countries: Spain, Italy, Romania, United Kingdom.

The ambitious long-term goal of the project Inventeurs is to foster social inclusion and equity in underprivileged schools through innovative and engaging connected learning experiences. The project will help to reduce the risk of disengagement and marginalisation, and can also help with the growing problem of tensions between different cultures and communities. All this through collaborative storytelling and innovative educational methodologies that will allow interconnecting disadvantaged schools, encouraging dialogue and cooperation among them, and encouraging their students and teachers to think and invent collaborative projects.

During the project activities students of disadvantaged schools in these countries are interconnected among them and with children from other schools. Mixed teams with children from different schools will co-create stories and invent solutions that revolve around global issues, chosen among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ​proposed at the Rio+20 Conference. Besides promoting virtual collaboration of schools, an important part of the work of our team also consists of providing training to schools and conducting workshops and activities with children. We provide these trainings in order to prepare the schools to start participating in the collaborative online project, and we especially focus on schools for underserved children.

The project is focused on fostering three big global competences:
- Creative thinking: our project is inspired by active learning theories and project based learning approaches; we want the children to stop being just users/consumers of technology and to become creators/producers.
- Teamworking: we promote virtual exchanges, peer to peer learning and collaborative learning.
- Critical thinking: we try to develop this competence with Development Education and Global Citizenship Education.

The project is empowered by means of several different technological platform/tools: Skype, Kidblog, Scratch, GlobalChangeMakers platform. Moreover a MOOC for teachers has been developed: to explain the project and its principles; to present the several tools that will be used during the activities; to provide some ideas and materials developed during the first phases of the project.

This paper presents and discusses the project experiences, outcomes and results.

Keywords:

Collaborative digital storytelling, Critical thinking, Social inclusion, Global citizenship education.