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Erasmus+, KA2

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Nicola Catellani
Network Coordinator - SERN

DEMETER

DEveloping interdisciplinary Methodologies in Education Through Enhanced Relationships between schools and farms

About the project

“DEveloping interdisciplinary Methodologies in Education Through Enhanced Relationships between schools and farms”, the full title of the project, is a sentence that expresses how the partnership interprets the need to accompany the use of technology at school with the use of natural settings and inspiration provided by one of the first activity of the history of man: agriculture. The farm setting is ideal for fostering motivation, interest and a deeper learning. Skills-related memories from planting, smelling and walking around a farm, doing experiments and using language are harder to forget. Cognitive memories from the classroom are more likely to be forgotten.
Furthermore, all the partners come from rural areas and are interested in giving new impulses to local communities by fostering the relations among all the components of their systems (schools, business, and public authorities). Children needs to be educated to appreciate the beauty of the places they live and see the resources available. This will stimulate in the future their participation in the local community, and their entrepreneurship as well, thus helping prevent depopulation of rural areas.

Objectives

The general objective is to improve the quality of school education provision by an increasing collaboration between schools and farms.

Specific objectives defined by the partners are:

  • to increase the experience of farms into the school curriculum in the framework of a wider path of education to food, respect for the environment, health
  • to improve the teaching skills among school teachers and educational farm operators by exchanging, consolidating and developing methodologies appropriate to a farm experience
  • to create synergies among education, institutions, business and research for the improvement of education.

Activities

In the three years of its duration, the project foresees:

  • 6 transnational project meetings aimed at supervising the implementation of the project
  • 2 multiplier events in each country to disseminate the project’s results
  • 1 Seminar aimed at illustrating the result of the research and development activities carried out and the content of the interdisciplinary methodology.

One of the activities foreseen in the implementation of the project is the collection of good practices promoting the most fruitful collaboration among farmers and schools. Once the good practices have been collected, each partner is then testing the practices in their own schools, to assess whether they can be adaptable in any context.

Below some videos in which the practices are tested:

Facetime a Farmer 

Pumpkin cookies

Cheese making activity

Results

Two outputs have been developed:

  • The first output- INTERDISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGY – illustrates the literature review and the practices collected and tested in the framework of the project as examples of fruitful collaboration between schools and farms. The practices were identified, shared and analyzed by the project team following the definition of a common template. Altogether 15 practices were identified only 11 were chosen as they met the quality criteria identified by the partnership. The first part of the description of each practice is dedicated to its content and how it was planned and implemented. The second part focuses on describing the context and shows why the practice was chosen as an effective example of collaboration between school and farm.
  • The second output- GUIDELINES – contains top tips on successful school-farm links, quality indicators to assess the effectiveness of farm-school collaborative practices and the toolkit. The toolkit is an easy tool for teachers and educators to design interdisciplinary school-farm learning pathways linked to the transversal objectives of the 2030 Agenda and to disciplinary learning objectives. The first part of the toolkit contains guidelines for effective planning between the school and the farm and a table cross-referencing the cards of the different practices implemented during the project on the basis of the objectives and thus enabling the teacher to select them on the basis of his or her own learning objectives and readapt them to his or her own context. The second part of the toolkit consists of the individual practice cards, compiled by the experimenting teachers following a template which guided them through the various phases of planning, monitoring and evaluating the children’s learning.

The toolkit

News from the Project
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