Blogs

“Education for Transformation”, collaboration with the TIDE research group with UNESCOCAT

Link to the platform "Educar per transformar" https://www.educarpertransformar.cat/ 

On 11 July, the Escola Virolai school in Barcelona held the presentation of the project: “Education for Transformation”, an initiative to promote the integration in schools of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) adopted by the United Nations through Project-Based Learning (PBL), thanks to collaboration between UNESCOCAT and the Research Group on Interactive and Distributed Technologies for Education (TIDE) of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF.

The agreement will promote the development of an online platform that provides a quality framework for project-based learning focusing on the sustainable development goals. The platform, developed by TIDE, aims to facilitate the creation, co-creation and implementation of such projects in the classroom, and also to provide a forum for contact and debate for the teaching community with tools and resources at their disposal.

The project presentation was given by Eduard Vallory, UNESCOCAT president, who then gave the floor to Marta Subirà, secretary for the Environment and Sustainability of the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia. Both emphasized the importance of the SDG to meet the global challenges of sustainability, and their close links with education to raise awareness and bring about change. The event was attended by some one hundred teachers interested in this work methodology.

The conference continued with the participation of Californian Bob Lenz, an expert in PBL at PBL Works (Project Based Learning for all, at the Buck Institute for Education, Novato, California). The speaker caught the public’s attention right from the outset explaining the origin of his passion for PBL when a primary school teacher gave him the opportunity to learn by doing a poetry project. He continued with the challenges and successes that his PBL model has achieved, to finally offer a couple of workshops in which the teachers were divided into groups to discuss their ideas from a couple of videos on PBL.

All in attendance were presented with an invitation and code to be the first to try the “Education for Transformation” platform, and thus lay the foundations of the first Catalan community of teachers who follow the PBL model for the SDG.