Pedagogical methods in SEEDS
SEEDS has developed a preschool pedagogy, described through a collection of resource materials that contain the SEEDS pedagogy, educational guidelines and principles, methods (the present page), best practice and a concrete toolkit with digital media resources. The resource materials were developed based on activities across local experimenting communities in the 4 partner countries; Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Denmark.
On this page we introduce two pedagogical methods, the experimenting community and the change maker pedagogy, which have been the fundamental work methods of the SEEDS project.
You can download a description of the pedagogical methods used in SEEDS in English, German, Italian, Greek and Danish.
The Experimenting Community
The experimenting community is a group of people experimenting together. The reason for being together is to try out, to play and experiment with everything from paper over robots to mobile phones. When you are in an experimenting community, you ask questions and look for answers. That means that you look for and find ways to establish a new pedagogical practise together with the children in your pre-school or kindergarten. You do not only copy an existing way of using a learning tool as it might be suggested by the producer of the tool. You try to find new ways of using this tool.
The Change Maker Pedagogy
The experimenting community is, in this project, firmly anchored in a new and innovative pedagogy called the change-maker pedagogy. Articulated by an entrepreneurship researcher, Sara Sarasvathy, it was developed from research into entrepreneurship education, and describe different levels of activity that can support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset by finding solutions to problems in a dynamic between an individual and collective perspective. It has never before been tested with preschool teachers or with young children. This pedagogy has been developed at Aarhus University over a period of 4-5 years with higher education students and teachers in professional development courses. One of the central elements of the pedagogy is being able to work flexibly, open-endedly in experimenting communities.
