TESTEd Teacher Education Network: Makerspace Event

31 May 2023

UCC recently hosted staff and students in Education from several UNIC universities, for three days of design thinking and creativity in the TESTEd ‘Makerspace’ hybrid event.

TESTEd is EU-funded and brings together universities, CPD providers and schools to work together to develop and implement the European Syllabus for teacher education. The project consortium partly owes its formation to the UNIC European University Alliance, with three of the six universities being part of UNIC: University College Cork, Ruhr University Bochum, and the University of Oulu.

The Makerspace event encouraged attendees to consider the question, "How might we create open educational resources to teach about gender sensitivity, multilingualism, digitalisation of the classroom, democratic citizenship and education for sustainable development?"

Led by UCC project co-ordinators from the School of Education – Senior Lecturer Design Thinking Pedagogy and Praxis, Dr Briony Supple, and Research Support Officer Nico Lorenzutti, along with expert facilitators, artists and student panellists, the hybrid event involved “intensive making, playing, learning, talking and laughing”, even including Lego for some “serious play”.

The event culminated with pitches for the open educational resources by student participants live in Cork and taking part virtually from Seville, Braga, Bochum and Oulu, the results of which were captured by illustrator Maia Thomas.

To find out more about the TESTEd project and network, check out: https://tested-network.eu/.

 Graphic by Maia Thomas