The project ‘Community-oriented Action-based Real-world Education’ (CARE) aimed at tackling just that. It was meant as a pilot collaboration between EUR students and vocational high schools (VMBO) in Rotterdam.

EUR students would act as facilitators for semester-long problem-oriented projects conducted by groups of 4 to 7 high school students. The high schoolers, supported by their EUR student-facilitators and the CARE team, would be responsible for identifying key social issues and key stakeholders in their communities.

Some adjustments had to take place. The pandemic placed a huge strain on VMBO schools in Rotterdam, forcing us to postpone the collaboration with them to the following academic year.

Consequently, our focus shifted. Instead, we developed a fully-fledged semester-long training on Experimental Pedagogics for EUR students; a ground-breaking new approach to educating the education innovators of tomorrow. Therefore, we expected students to be able to gain control and responsibility for their own learning journey, to experience the connection between theory and practice, and to develop competencies such as collaboration and reflection. No longer able to interact with the VMBO schools in Rotterdam, students were invited to design an intervention for a community close to their hearts anywhere in the world.

Students were invited to explore real-life societal problems in an open-ended and interdisciplinary way for them to gain ownership and responsibility for their learning and the opportunity to integrate social responsibility into their academic lives. It is an approach that doesn’t just tell students about education, but in which they  experience  the things they are learning about firsthand, and in which they get a chance to  experiment  with their own education designs.

At the heart of experimental pedagogics lies the premise that education is by nature a transdisciplinary endeavor: from the top, it is borne from the multiple disciplines that constitute its contents, and the multidisciplinary angles that feed into its process. From the bottom, education gives meaning to our experience of the world, challenging us to make sense of the messy inputs of our unscripted reality. Experimental pedagogics provides a comprehensive structure for what would otherwise be an overwhelming whole: education’s relationship with existence is examined through five distinct “levels” of analysis, from a cognitive to a global lens.

Experimental pedagogics is experiential learning par excellence. There are three “tracks” in the program: the education track, the project track, and the reflection track.

• The project track was organized around problem-oriented project work (PPL) which encourages active and real-world learning. The main principles revolve around problem-orientation, agency, interdisciplinarity and systemic thinking.
• The reflection track consists of a comprehensive guided reflection process, comprising of an entry and an exit interview in which the student sets personal learning goals for the project and analyses the extent to which they have been met, group reflection sessions, a reflection diary, and an articulated learning reflection.
• The education track explores pedagogical theories and approaches across the different “levels” of analysis. With lectures and workshops, the relationships between education and our lives have been examined.

Excited by the possibility of engaging with real-life situations and eager to implement their intervention, four out of the five student teams have been actively involved in pushing their experiment forward and having it executed in the fall of 2021. In order to document what the students have worked on; videos are being created displaying the process as experienced by both the teachers and the students.

Moreover, in order to disseminate the knowledge acquired, two academic papers are being developed. The CARE project has been nominated as a finalist of the Falling Walls Future Learning 2021 award as well as for the LDE education prize 2021. Moreover, Ginie Servant (CARE Project Coordinator) is going to apply to the Comenius Senior Fellowship 2022. In the chance this grant is being secured, resources will become available to develop a summer school to train teachers of the Netherlands in this way of working. Finally, this pilot will be translated into an EUC (Erasmus University College) minor for the academic year 2022 – 2023.