The BLOOM School box creates a precedent for Bioeconomy teaching!
The BLOOM School Box is the result of a fruitful collaboration and co-creation process. It is a pioneering collection of bioeconomy related teaching resources which educators can use to introduce the concept of bioeconomy in their classrooms as a trigger to raise student interest in science subjects and their awareness of critical societal challenges.
The basis of the BLOOM School Box is five innovative learning scenarios, co-created and tested in classrooms by the 20 BLOOM pilot teachers from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Israel, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Special attention was given to ensuring that the developed learning scenarios are complementary and not competitive to the national curricula, fostering their maximum use and adoption.
Moving further, in an attempt for the BLOOM School Box to reach out to as many teachers as possible, a three-step dissemination strategy was implemented.
Initially, the BLOOM teacher trainings that were carried out by the pilot teachers aimed at increasing exponentially the number of teachers that would use Bioeconomy in their lessons. Additionally, the BLOOM MOOC that was launched, representing an important step in raising awareness of bioeconomy among educators and in scaling up the use of the pedagogical resources on bioeconomy included in the BLOOM School Box. More than 1,500 educators worldwide learned about the MOOC and registered to take part. More than 800 (mostly) teachers followed the course, reaching almost 10,000 students.
Moreover, by incorporating the “Teach Bioeconomy!” Competition in the MOOC and connecting it with important European wide initiatives in STEM education such as the 2019 STEM Discovery Campaign, further opportunities of increasing the online visibility of the project and the number of educational materials in the BLOOM School Box were exploited.
Finally, the BLOOM stories of Implementation competition published exemplary implementation stories in four categories: Teaching bioeconomy in primary schools; Teaching with bioeconomy in STEM classes for individual work; and Integrating STEM teaching with bioeconomy; Integrating STEAM teaching with bioeconomy for interdisciplinary team implementation. The network closed its contribution to the promotion of Bioeconomy teaching on 16th and 18th of November at the Global Bioeconomy Summit 2020. Pilot teachers and winners of the last competition shared their experiences and their expertise that was gained while supporting the project. The participants of the workshop were able to interact with the teachers and bringing that way bioeconomy experts and educators closer once more.
