CASE - Creativity, Art and Science in Primary Education
The CASE project is structured around the understanding that scientific inquiry must be known more as an integral part of daily life and less as a faraway myth in isolated institutions. The partners of the CASE project expect to train fifty primary school teachers for the duration of three years. Each year they organise a summer school for teachers, educators and artists.
The main project objectives of the CASE project are:
- To design and develop training materials aimed at training primary school teachers. These include user-friendly manuals, guidelines, learning scenarios, open educational resources and social-media tools, available on the project’s Web platform. For this purpose, the project’s partners build upon the work of state-of-the-art European projects in the field of creative education.
- To implement a widespread training approach for teachers that facilitates the uptake of creative practices in Inquiry-Based Science Education at primary schools. The project’s partners carry out numerous international mobility activities, in which primary school teachers gain the necessary know-how to implement activities in schools and further develop their own CASE-inspired initiatives.
- To validate and evaluate the project’s approach. Systematic validation and evaluation are implemented to identify the project’s impact in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
- To provide guidelines for continued communication and exploitation of the project’s results by the primary education community. A specific roadmap, including guides for sustainability and further exploitation of the project’s outcomes, is developed and made available to the public.
The main results of the project are thus expected to be the following:
- Strengthening the profile of primary school teachers by motivating them to undertake a deeper change in their approaches to science education. This is realised through the strengthening of creativity and incorporation of arts education practices in their methods.
- Improving achievements in high-level basic and transversal competences.
- Designing, communicating and representing creative Inquiry-Based Science Education approaches for primary schools in science education supported by a) teacher training activities (workshops, mobility activities) and b) the development of relevant training materials.
- Supporting the development of an innovative sustainable way of learning, which may be leveraged for the benefit of primary school students.
- Establishing a network of CASE’s primary school teacher practitioners.
Basic information
The project’s partners gather and analyse data from the implementation of the activities in five countries. These countries are Norway, Greece, Netherlands, Lithuania and Ireland. The research makes a reference to the results, according to the effectiveness of the project's proposed creativity-based educational framework.
The partners of the CASE project develop three main outputs and carry out three main activities that are relevant to teachers.
The three main outputs of CASE
- Development of support materials.
- Implementation activities and pilot activities.
- Evaluation, validation and quality of the project’s activities.
The three main training activities of CASE
- Participants are trained to implement the CASE pilot activities and become CASE agents in their countries. This training takes place during three CASE summer schools in July of 2018, 2019 and 2020, in Marathon, Greece.
- The CASE partners organise two national conferences in Greece, the Netherlands, Ireland and Lithuania. One national and one international conference are organised in Norway. The aim of the international conference is to raise awareness of the project among policy-makers in the European community and other international stakeholders.
- The CASE Toolkits
- A general toolkit about the methods of creativity and arts in science education is developed. This toolkit comprises a suite of theoretical and image and video-based examples aimed at supporting primary teachers’ implementation of the CASE approach in schools
- Secondly, the Toolkit for the Learning Science Through Theatre (LSTT) Case comprises guidelines and practical scenarios aimed at supporting primary teachers’ implementation of an LSTT method in schools, following Science View’s experience in the field.
- Thirdly, a Toolkit for the Learning Science Through Puppetry Case comprises guidelines and practical scenarios aimed at supporting primary teachers’ implementation of the “Puppetry Method” in schools, following Speel je Wijs’s experience in the field.
- Finally, the Toolkits for the Learning Science Through Digital Narratives Case comprise guidelines and practical scenarios aimed at supporting primary teachers’ implementation of the “Narratives” and “Slow-motion” methods in schools following Aristotle University’s experience in the field; also the Digital Storytelling approach following Elinogermaniki Agogi’s experience.
The main materials that have already been created as part of the CASE project can be found at: http://www.project-case.eu/educational-resources/