Our first advisory board took place in December. All board members work in the field of inclusive education and share our focus on diversity and inclusion. The main task of the advisory board is to guide the project team in making decisions and prioritising activities within the objectives of the project. The people in the advisory board are critical friends from our partner countries. This network is also important to help spread our results.
Goals
During this first meeting, we discussed the design of the project: what goals do we have in mind and what is needed to…
create knowledge about how to make the collaboration process - Communities of Practice (CoP) - more transparent and effective to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard, also the voices of the pupils themselves.
support these collaboration processes at secondary schools we intend to use a specific approach – CoP – in which all actors are included in school development with a specific goal, based on the specific needs of the school.
Knowledge base
During this advisory board we focused on the knowledge base, a self-serve online library about our project and its 4 key concepts:
Community of Practice
Inclusive education
Interprofessional collaboration
Pupil agency
Opportunities and challenges
The project team and the board members see opportunities to create a strong inclusive discourse in which the voice of students is central. For this project, it's important to have a common language and common examples, even with different realities, because the goal is the same: to support inclusive education.
Besidess opportunities, we also see challenges. The biggest challenge is how to create COPs, not just in a verbal way. They have to be accessible and normative according to what we do in schools.
The next steps
Appreciation for the hard work during these initial project activities helps the team to continue working in a focused and enthusiastic manner. From a strong theoretical base, we will offer targeted support to schools and reach out to different stakeholders from different countries. We will create a reflection tool for the schools to work with. It will be a challenge to tailor it taking into account the different education systems in the I CO-COPE partner countries.
In five schools per country, we will conduct a survey for school professionals and students. Based on the results, we want to invite the schools to reflect on their initial situation regarding interprofessional collaboration and pupil participation. In two of these schools we will install a Community of Practice.
We got off to a good start and are excited to continue the project team's research, supporting schools, meeting students and engaging with various stakeholders. This curiosity and enthusiasm is also present among the participants of our advisory board. The responses below demonstrate this.
