“I want to really get stuck in, see how people in this field do their job and work with their materials,” said an enthusiastic Selena, a school student at Bonn’s Liebfrauenschule, at the wrap-up event for the MULTIPLIERS Horizon 2020 project held at the city’s LVR-Landesmuseum. Hers was one of three partner schools from Bonn involved in the project. MULTIPLIERS’ open-schooling approach is geared toward opening up schools and providing spaces for research-based learning. As well as enjoying direct contact with partners from research and industry, therefore, the aim is also to enable the schoolchildren to pass on their newly acquired knowledge, e.g. through podcasts and videos.
But how come it worked so well? Quite simply, the schools were spared the laborious task of tracking down the experts themselves as they would otherwise have to do. Besides saving teachers time and removing some of the organizational obstacles, this has other benefits too, as Dr. Barbara Busert—a teacher at the Liebfrauenschule in Bonn—explains: “The experts were more or less served up to us on a plate. This made life a lot easier for us, because we could rest assured that we were getting some highly skilled, highly dedicated people who would convey the topics to the children fantastically well.”
For example, a number of podcasts on diet and nutrition were made at the Liebfrauenschule in collaboration with the ImmunoSensation Cluster of Excellence and the nonprofit association Impfaufklärung in Deutschland e. V. Meanwhile, the GGS Michaelschule produced video reports on school students’ experiences of their visits throughout the year to the Wiesengut Campus—the University of Bonn’s organic teaching and research site in Hennef—and showed them at the school’s open house.
Professor Annette Scheersoi, Vice Rector for Sustainability at the University and coordinator of the MULTIPLIERS project, had this to say at the end of three successful years: “All I hope is that many, many more schools get the chance to experience this kind of teaching, i.e. that many more schoolchildren are able to tackle the big challenges of our time in a really practical way.” Professor Scheersoi firmly believes that the project has to keep going, expand its networks and remain part of day-to-day learning despite its funding phase having now ended.
Feedback from partners has also been positive, says the project coordinator, because “not only have the schoolchildren themselves learned a massive amount, the partners have also been able to get across their enthusiasm for their own subject or line of work.”
A total of 20 schools from across Europe took part in 18 different initiatives that turned schoolchildren into young experts in air pollution, vaccination, biodiversity and ecosystem services, biodiversity and agriculture, exploiting vs. protecting the forests, clean water and sanitation, and antibiotic resistance. “We also made a podcast, and I’d say that I’m now better informed about HPV and vaccinations than other people my age,” says Selena, attesting to the project’s success.
Even though the EU funding phase has now come to an end, there is already some good news for the Bonn region: together with the University of Bonn, the Dr. Hans Riegel Foundation will be supporting the MULTIPLIERS project at local level for a further three years from 2025, thus enabling a great many schoolchildren to engage in practical learning in the natural sciences. There are already some concrete plans for new topics and additional partners from different (research) institutions.
... to the press release of the university:
... more on the MULTILIERS project: