On the 4th and 5th of June, Viladecans hosted the URBACT Campus, two intense days spent training municipal technicians and local stakeholders associated with the 17 URBACT transfer networks operating in Spain today. It was there where we introduced the ON BOARD to the other participating cities.
A COLLECTIVE LEARNING JOURNEY
The main objective of this encounter was to exchange experiences, generate knowledge, provide new tools and share projects among the 17 municipalities that participate in one of the European Transfer Networks. Through practical sessions with a participative approach led by Mireia Sanabria and Maria Joan Filgueiras, both URBACT experts, we were able to address such a range of issues as the importance of working in an integrated, participative way, bearing in mind the opinions of local stakeholders and the difficulties that cities encounter when transferring a good practice.
GETTING TO KNOW ON BOARD AND THE EIN
On the second day of the URBACT Campus, Viladecans, the lead city in the ON BOARD transfer network, presented its educational project to the other towns and spoke about the essential role that education plays in the different member cities.
The participants were able to learn more about the good practice on which ON BOARD is based: the Educational Innovation Network (EIN), an organisation made up of teachers, students, parent associations, families, companies, entities and the local government. They also learned about its main mission: to improve educational success by stimulating innovation and creativity in the classroom; spearheading new projects and/or initiatives, especially using the new technologies; and getting society as a whole and the economic and business community involved in the development of projects that intertwine the world of education with entrepreneurship and business.
ON BOARD was presented along with a field trip to La Montserratina school in Viladecans (a member of the EIN), with the goal of ensuring that local technicians and agents from all over Spain could learn firsthand about the educational projects underway, which the school director herself presented and showed through a tour of the school. The visitors were taken on a tour of the school vegetable garden, they saw the different learning spaces and they shared activities with the students using tablets, as well as other activities. The tour ended with an emotional education session in which the participants put into practice some of the classroom dynamics conducted with students.
