Our Educational Approach: Innovative education
Inclusive education ensures that every child, regardless of ability, background, or learning needs, can meaningfully participate in learning activities. This aligns with the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which emphasizes the right to inclusive education for all.
Inclusive Education
Thus inclusive education needs to be implemented in a way that allows all students to participate. To this end, the game has been intensively tested in European classrooms to identify challenges and refine its design. Nonetheless, this type of print-and-play games for groups recognises its limitations, such as the reliance on reading, the cognitive demands of understanding complex concepts, less durable and tangible physical materials, a lack of audio or digital interactivity, time constraints, and group dynamics that may hinder full participation.
To address these issues, teachers can apply various frameworks to enhance inclusivity. For example, both the UN 4-A framework and the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) allow for theory-based and practical approaches to education that facilitate the participation of every child by recognizing their unique abilities and learning needs.
Criteria for Innovative Activities
We defined three criteria for innovative activities for global citizenship and sustainable development:
Active: Our approach is games-based, playful and aims for active engagement and participation. It is inspired by research that shows that it is through arts-based and embodied activities, rather than simply cognitive knowledge, that learners become engaged in sustainability challenges. Examples can be recycling projects, local gardening, integrating the SDGs into the everyday curriculum, waste collection or hiking days in the local parks or countryside.
Transformative: Transformative education can be seen as more holistic than traditional education, integrating activities for the head, heart and hands. So combining more abstract ideas with issues anchored in real life that children have a strong emotional connection with and expressing this in a wide variety of sensual forms. Such as drawing, painting, carpentry, posters, models, drama etc. Integrating this more systemic approach can make the learning experience more comprehensive, memorable and meaningful. Such an experience can empower children to become change agents in their own local environments thus triggering a wider positive change.
Collective: We aim to design inclusive education so that every child, regardless of their ability, background, or learning needs, can meaningfully participate in learning activities. To that end we have built participative and convivial elements into the games to encourage collaborative problem-solving and solidarity. The games are not competitive but for their success depend on collaboration and a combining a variety of skills.
Based on these three criteria for innovative education, you’ll see that we’ve ranked the games using a 5 star system. This translates as: 0-1 stars for some active properties, 0-2 for transformative properties and 0-2 for collective properties. A game which contains all these properties earns the maximum score of 5 stars.
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