ON BOARD visits Albergaria
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09 March 2020The ON BOARD project continues on its way and arrives at the third Transnational Meeting. Last September the city partners met in Albergaria-a-Velha, a 26.000 inhabitants Portuguese city that made all visitors feel at home.
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After focusing on the political support and the teachers involvement in the two first transnational meetings, the third one was devoted to analyse the role that companies and universities can play, and the partnerships they can create with schools, to boost educational innovation.
A total of 13 representatives of the business and university sector from the six partner cities (the “special guests”) had the opportunity to interact and discuss how these sectors can collaborate with schools and develop innovative projects. Several interesting initiaves came out from the working groups such as certifying those companies that collaborate with schools so they can have some advantages in public procurement processes or inviting school headmasters or managers to make some staging in innovative companies to learn some techniques that can be applied back in their schools (as ON BOARD partner, Tallinn, already implements).
According to Isabel Sobrino, enterpreneur in the technological sector from Viladecans, “it was a surprise to see how the representatives from the different cities, even from different countries and realities, face similar problems and solutions. In the business working group, we discussed the difficulty we, as business, have to collaborate with the education world. If we only collaborate based on “goodwill” it is quite likely that they just end up in occasional collaborations, as many companies, specially medium and small ones, do not have time, staff nor resources to carry out this collaborations. However, bringing together business with students and teachers is very positive, as it helps them to see the real world of work, which skills are needed, and the wide range of profesional careers. We need to design mechanisms to encourage companies to collaborte with schools.”
Colin de la Higuera, teacher at the University of Nantes felt that “Things are moving in education and ways of teaching. I have seen people active, I have seen key-ideas about how to do for making education not an only teacher/pupil relationship but also a place where you can also find various stakeholders such as companies, university, local authorities and extra-school time organizations”.
Participants had the opportunity to see and learn about a wide range of educational projects explained by the students, teachers and implementers of each.
Apart from visiting several projects on the spot, Albergaria-a-velha organised a market place to showcase local education projects where attendees could interact with the responsible people of each one of them, express their opinions and get to know more about all the projects implemented by Albergaria along the school centres and beyond.
Albergaria-a-Velha meeting also focused on the communication actions needed to ensure lively communities, that is active Educational Innovation Networks. Viladecans shared their own experience, however, its is now the turn for ON BOARD cities to define and adapt its communication plans according to their need and resources.
Find below the link with the TM3 Report and the video that summarises the Transnational Meeting 3 in Portugal;
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