Recognized for Open Pedagogy
From the nominator:
The top reason CONNECT Open Schooling deserves a 2025 Excellence in Open Pedagogy Award is its transformative CARE-KNOW-DO model, empowering over 50,000 learners, teachers, and communities across underserved regions in Europe, Africa and Brazil. By addressing real-world challenges, this inclusive open pedagogy fosters critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity—advancing equity, sustainability, and innovation in education.
The project, supported by the European Commission, the Brazilian Government, and Open Societal Challenges, enabled teachers to enhance their pedagogical practices. Open Schooling, which emerged in 2015, means empowering learners to solve real-life problems they care about, supported by curriculum content they need to know and actions they can do in collaboration with their communities and researchers towards sustainability. This open pedagogy enabled primary and secondary pupils, pre-service apprentices, in-service teachers, and doctoral students to co-create various solutions such as open educational resources, video clips, podcasts, knowledge maps, apps, and augmented reality artefacts.
The CARE-KNOW-DO Open Pedagogy Model is a truly exemplary project with significant, proven impact that is from an under-represented region, a historically marginalized group, and represents a language other than English. This initiative, through the open schooling project CONNECT, has engaged over 50,000 students, teachers, families, researchers, and community partners across across underserved regions in Europe, Africa, and Brazil and is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It seems like a highly collaborate endeavor as well. Innovative pedagogical strategies are created and shared by project developers and teachers. And the CONNECT platform is offered in five languages.
Additionally, I find aspects like this so exciting: “Teachers, educators, and students from rural areas had the opportunity to meet and talk with the Ministry of Education of Brazil and showcase their open pedagogy projects through open videocasts and podcasts that integrated open education, local culture, and digital skills to advance quality education grounded in the realities of their communities.” The global and local nature of the initiative seems to be the best of what Open Education can do and be.
Award Reviewer
This is a highly impactful OER project that has proven its worth for the teaching community in widespread geographic regions and multiple languages. Having adaptable resources is key to the success of any such endeavour.
Award Reviewer
Learn More
- CONNECT (project web site)
- Inclusive Open Schooling with engaging and future-oriented science (pdf, CONNECT project)
- Fostering Transversal Skills through Open Schooling with the CARE-KNOW-DO Framework for Sustainable Education (Sustainability journal)
