CNR-ITD

Framework

With sharply increasing cultural, linguistic and socio-economic diversity in Europe’s school populations, there is urgency to shift towards educational practices that embrace the inclusion of all learners. Learner diversity is now to be viewed as an intrinsic - and positive - characteristic of our schools. Accordingly, we need to support teachers’ endeavours to establish inclusion as a cornerstone of their practice. Many feel ill-prepared to teach classes that are ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse and where learner backgrounds differ markedly from their own. The challenge is to ensure that ALL students, including those facing educational disadvantage, have optimal chances of realizing their potential as students and future European citizens.

Objectives

PLEIADE responds positively to this scenario by treating it as an opportunity for needs-driven educational innovation powered by teachers’ professional capacity building. PLEIADE intends to support the efforts of European teachers to systematically integrate inclusive practices in their teaching. It does this by helping them to work together on the design, implementation and sharing of inclusion-aware learning designs. These designs centre on carefully orchestrated learner collaboration, a widely recognized approach not just for strengthening acquisition of curriculum contents but also for supporting inclusive classroom dynamics and attitudes.

PLEIADE will thus foster the inclusion of all children, especially under-privileged ones, for cultural, social or economic reasons. The PLEIADE methods and tools will be made available to teachers who do not belong to the project’s partnership.

Main activities

The main activity phases in PLEIADE involve:

• defining a Teachers’ Professional Development (TPD) pathway in inclusive oriented education enhanced by bespoke tools; the pathway will consist of blended (a mix of online and onsite) training activities lasting 13 months and involving the four PLEIADE partner schools;
• delivering the above pathway of blended training activities; the training will engage an immediate target population of about 75 teachers at primary and secondary schools in Italy, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Greece, whose schools are consortium members; the approach will be playful and practice based, and participants will be supported in the design of collaborative and inclusive learning activities for their students;
• enacting the classroom activities designed during the training in the Partner Schools; the enactment is expected to involve around 600 pupils in the four schools, many of whom experience educational disadvantage due to cultural, linguistic and socio-economic diversity;
• amplifying impact through exchange of experiences, dissemination of outputs and preparation for transfer to other contexts. To this end, PLEIADE will organise 5 Multiplier Events:
  • an international Multiplier Event will be organized by CNR-ITD in conjunction with the associated partner Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) at the ATEE2022 Spring Conference, scheduled to take place in Italy.
  • another International Multiplier Event will be organized by EDEN in Athens in conjunction with the EDEN Open Classroom Conference, an event that attracts stakeholder-group participants from all over Europe.
  • three national Multiplier Events organised by the Sofia, Trani and Limassol schools; these will have a predominantly national/regional focus in their respective countries (Bulgaria, Italy and Cyprus).

Main Outputs

The chief PLEIADE outputs are:

• an innovative gamified TPD pathway dedicated to inclusive education, learning design, and collaborative learning (IO1);
• a Hybrid Game (the I4Ts) of tangible and digital elements that supports teachers’ design of collaborative, inclusion-aware learning activities based on the 4Ts approach (IO2);
• a gamified digital platform providing a scaffolded context for teacher interaction regarding the deployment of PLEIADE - inspired classroom activities and the exchange of related experiences (IO3);
• a collection of innovative practices generated by the PLEIADE teacher community (IO4);
• an evaluation kit for inclusive-aware collaborative learning activities (IO5);
• an impact amplification kit (IO6).

Project Manager (from september 1st, 2020 to september 30th, 2022):