EDU-CITY: The city as a learning space

Edu-City contributed to highlight and learn from undervalued resources of the city by creating on field participatory practices with adults living and working in deprived neighborhoods. As experienced by project partners, often fragile adults are the one more excluded from local opportunities of inclusion and participation. The project offered from one side the opportunity to train a new professional figure of neighborhood facilitators (selected among the partners and associated partners staff) and on the other to develop Open Educational Practices with the communities of five deprived urban contexts, offering them opportunities of inclusion, participation, learning and local resources valorisation. Moreover Edu-City recognised the educational value of territorial competences and local expertise of the different territories and used them to activate processes of participation and civic engagement but also empowerment of job and life perspectives of the fragile adults involved in project activities.

With EduCity the partners wanted to experience the use of city neighborhoods as educational environments, to offer non-formal learning opportunities for fragile residents and to exploit them to promote social inclusion, participation and community engagement processes. By designing a handbook and a training scheme the partners provided methods and tools to recognise territorial resources as memories, stories, ideas and competences of local citizens and to transform them into educational opportunities (Specific Objective 1: to recognise, valorise and map place-based knowledge and competences owned by fragile adults). Moreover they tested these educational resources in a training for neighborhood facilitators, involving their and associated partners staff (Specific Objective 2: to train adult educators as neighborhood facilitators able to activate participatory processes of valorisation of the local resources with a target of fragile adults). During the realization of local practices the facilitators worked on enhancing bottom-up participatory processes of valorisation of local resources with fragile adults, defined as Open Educational Practices (Specific Objective 3: to exploit the use of place-based knowledge and competences).

The first project activity has been the definition of an educational approach based on the concept of neighborhood as a learning environment. This phase provided for significant learning contents for Edu-City training and it laid the foundation to accomplish the first project results, the Edu-City Handbook. The second activity has been the design of a training scheme to train neighborhood facilitators intended as professionals able in transforming place-based knowledge and competences into educational opportunities. The third activity was the realization of the training for neighborhood facilitators. Twentythree adult educators, representatives of the five project partners and associated partners have been trained in Palermo following the five modules of Edu-City training scheme. The fourth activity foreseen was the realization of five job shadowing during which the trained neighborhood facilitators had the possibility to travel in one of the partner countries to experience on field applied practices of neighborhood facilitation. The fifth activity has seen Edu-City partnership engaged in the design and implementation of local educational laboratories and activities with fragile adults to activate processes of participation and civic engagement. The sixth and last phase of the project was the development of an Open Education Practices (OEP) Compendium which resumed and collected the five applications of the methodology in the selected neighborhoods as case-studies.

The first result developed by the project partners has been the Edu-City handbook on the use of the neighborhood as a learning space. It includes the educational approach designed by the partnership and based on the contribution of our concrete experience in participative empowerment processes and a collection of methods and exercises to explore, map and valorise place-based competences and local resources. Second main result is the Edu-City training scheme and the realization of an international training in Italy for twentythree neighborhood facilitators. Edu-City training scheme contributes to rationalize and put in one unique framework several methodologies, tools, best practices, practical experiences and non-formal educational approaches that contribute to define and complete the role of a neighborhood facilitator. Five neighborhood facilitators have also taken part in a job shadowing experience in the partner local contexts. The third main expected outcome has been the effective participation and active involvement of more than 100 fragile adults in local educational activities created and realized with the neighborhood facilitators. The educational practices of valorisation of place-based knowledge and competences in the five selected neighborhoods have been collected in the fourth main result, the Open Educational Practices Compendium. It includes a narration of the experiences that the neighborhood facilitators have realized in the local contexts during Edu-City. The final result of Edu-City has been the realization of four community events in Palermo, Sofia, Seville and Marseille and of one international conference in Berlin on the use of the neighborhood as learning space.