The ‘Schools as Living Labs’ (SALL) project (www.schoolsaslivinglabs.eu) serves Europe’s aim to promote open schooling and collaboration on science education, whereby the term “open schools” refers to schools which are open to society and, in cooperation with other stakeholders, become agents of community well-being by creating new partnerships in their local communities. Moving in this direction, SALL proposes the living lab methodology as a specific practical approach for the development of open schooling activities linked to science learning in Europe’s schools.
In SALL a living lab activity is defined as a process which involves collaboration among various societal actors who wish to deal together with a certain problem or issue which is important to them. This includes: a) “co-creation” of ideas to solve the problem/issue, after exploring it; b) development of basic elements of the solution, fast and economically (prototyping); and c) testing the solution with the stakeholders to get feedback and improve it.
SALL proposes that school communities can apply the innovative educational methodology based on living labs developed by the project, to develop the open schooling approach in practice, with students’ active initiative and participation throughout the process. In a living lab school project, students get engaged in co-creating solutions to real problems from their own real-life experiences through synergies with the local community.
Thus, SALL proposes a concrete new way for schools across Europe to make science education more relevant, systemic and inclusive for their students, while collaborating with, and with support from, their local communities, researchers, other stakeholders, as well as science museums and centres.
Through systematic collaboration within the project team as well as between the project and the community of stakeholders, SALL co-creates its living-lab-based open schooling methodology by building on existing knowledge and best practices.
Applying this methodology in real-life educational settings, SALL closely studies the developing living-lab-based open schooling activities and their impact. The implementation and evaluation activities on the field are realized in collaboration with school communities which are facilitated to develop living lab school projects and become active members of the SALL network. By the end of the project, this network will include at least 412 schools, 1000 teachers and 10.000 students from 10 countries.
Building on this work, SALL also prepares the ground for sustainable living-lab-based open schooling activities in Europe’s schools after the end of the project, through strong community building, networking, dissemination and communication activities, as well as policy-oriented interventions.
