Social Cooperative Contest for Secondary Schools

Project Summary

The SCoopConSS project (Social Cooperative Contest for Secondary Schools) will pilot an innovative and engaging methodology to introduce and enhance cooperative business education in secondary schools, starting from topic-related teachers who will involve colleagues from other disciplines and students in the simulated establishment of a social cooperative focused on one or more of the 17 UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). The main objective is to build a Community of Practice for European secondary school teachers interested in boosting their teaching practice by using different entrepreneurial methods based on the cooperative principles of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.

The specific objective of the project is to promote the acquisition of professional teaching tools and methods for teachers, aimed at facilitating the development of entrepreneurial skills for students in school. In order to achieve this goal, 6 organisations from five different Southern European countries will cooperate during a timeframe of 18 months. A common goal for all members of the consortium is to fill the training gap on entrepreneurial skills of the teaching staff. In order to address this objective, SCoopConSS will be implemented through the following activities

• desk research and cross-checked analysis of successful practices in youth entrepreneurship training and education schemes (stabilize knowledge)
• national and international coaching circles with business, marketing and administrative secondary school teachers for the participated design of a training programme aimed at enhancing their competences on cooperative business, cooperative and project-based teaching methods, multidisciplinary and open schooling approaches (promote innovative teaching methods)
• development, piloting and revision of a blended training course to support teachers in mentoring their students for the participation at the first edition of the EU Scoop! Contest, a Social Cooperative Simulation Contest to be scaled-up at EU level (develop skills).

The main idea is to form the core of knowledge and methodologies (guidelines and teaching toolkits) for the promotion in school of collective entrepreneurship as a suitable/viable option for youth. In fact, at a time when young people are disproportionately struggling with unemployment and the lack of decent work, the project wants to enable school teachers to better present to their students how cooperatives can create job opportunities and better working conditions for them, with a broader aim to introduce cooperative entrepreneurship education in European secondary school. The project will not only deal with a theoretical component, but it will also offer concrete opportunities for teachers and students to experience first hands the cooperative environment through job-shadowing, meeting with representatives of the cooperative world and a simulation contest. Much attention in the project will be paid to peer education and participatory approaches. The selected pool of educators will, in fact, learn how to better approach cooperative business teaching by interacting regularly with each other through online and face to face meetings, where they will learn from each other by knowledge and experience. An innovative solution in the project is in fact the use of the coaching circles, a collaborative process for peer to peer learning that accelerates learning and provides a safe space for participants to practice their coaching skills. Here teachers together with 5 cooperative professionals will be able to create a guideline reference for teaching cooperative business, that will result in a blended training course for the selected teachers. The main outcomes of the proposals are:

• a better understanding of existing training tools on teaching entrepreneurship
• modernization/adaptation of the existing curricula to create specific tools for social business teaching
• implementation of a blended-training course on cooperative business and teaching tools experimentation and students mentoring.

Topic: Social Cooperative Education
Total budget: 233.098 €
EU Contribution: 209.788 €
Call ID: 303-G-GRO-PPA-19-11225
Start date: 01/03/2020
End date: 31/12/2021

Partnership:

• aCapo Società Cooperativa Sociale Integrata (Partner) - Italy
• Anaptyxiako Kentro Thessalias (Partner) - Greece
• Associação Portuguesa de Startups (Partner) - Portugal
• Cámara de Comercio e Industria Italiana para España (Partner) - Spain
• Centar tehničke kulture Rijeka (Partner) - Croatia
• European Grants International Academy Srl (Coordinator) - Italy