author: Enrique Sanchez-Bautista

The Digital Era in which we live brings  structural changes in our ways of living: one key element that our society must face is changes in the education system: It is not easy to build schools that will cater to the needs of the fast-changing world of the 21^st century, yet the there is a promise for that: The Open Schools for Open Societies Project (OSOS).

The European Commission’s three-year  project – Open Schools for Open Societies (OSOS) – celebrated its final achievements in a conference that took place on 14^th February 2020 at the Pavilhao Do Conhecimento in Lisbon.

During the course of these years, this big scale project gathered over 1100 schools, 2100 teachers, and 80.000 high school students. The OSOS model proposed school heads a framework to collaborate between schools: different schools could form together an innovation hub, in which they could help each other, collect good practices and share their experiences. Moreover, it proposed a design in which students could learn from the real world situations.[1]

The European Physical Society, which was part of the OSOS consortium, participated along with national policy makers, university professors and 30 school leaders from 15 European countries in the recent closing ceremony conference that demonstrated the successful implementation of the project in Portugal.

In this context, over 150 students and teachers from all corners in the country showcased their exciting work and shared their open schooling experiences. The highlight of the event included inspiring talks by the students on their work and on what they think are the real challenges in education and in life. All the 30 school projects addressed very important issues such as climate change, local environmental issues, democracy, participation, inclusion, engagement, the defense of science, the threat of misinformation, outdoor education and other contemporary ideas.[2]

As a partner in OSOS, the EPS contributed to the dissemination and sustainability project plan by facilitating all the partners with its network of science teachers in Europe and by providing all the relevant information about meetings, trainings and conferences throughout Europe where its members would be contacted to disseminate the project’s results.[3]

Given the successful outcome of OSOS project, European Physical society will continue to advocate for the open schooling approach that showed the transformative potential of the education system, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.