The second Student Voice project meeting was held in Dublin, Ireland on 18-19th January with the participation of the five partner institutions from Ireland, Scotland, Hungary, Slovenia, and The Netherlands. The purpose of the meeting was to prepare evaluation tools at national and transnational level and plan further steps of the project.
On the first day, Paula Flynn (Trinity College) opened the meeting with a thought-provoking presentation entitled Nothing about us without us, which summarized the main purposes of the Student Voice project. The presentation was followed by a visit of students from the St. Joseph’s Secondary School, which gave insights for the project members about how the Student Voice group works at the local school.
After a lunch break project members gave short presentations on the current state of the project progress on a national level, to which critical friends gave useful feedback. Lucia Kákonyi (hungarian project coordinator) gave a brief introduction to the Hungarian education system and its three-level content regulation. She emphasised that the success of the project can be reached through a school-level approach.
The second day of the project meeting began with a short round of comments on first day’s presentations. Afterwards, John Moriarty (NCCA) introduced project members to useful digital tools for collecting exemplification at participating schools, then Fanni Sólyom-Nagy (project communication assistant) introduced the status of the homepage development.
Annette Koopmans, Jeroen Bron and Annette van der Laan, representatives of SLO from the Netherlands introduced the concept of evaluation planning.
As a closure to the two-day-long meeting, the hungarian project members outlined the topics and programme of the next project meeting which will be held in Budapest, Hungary.
The aim of the new project is to empower students to participate meaningfully and collaboratively in improving their experience of school, encouraging their engagement in learning and improving teacher-student relationships. Student voice - the Bridge to Learning will provide different models of working in partnership with students by giving them voice and develop their skills and attitudes to become responsible and democratic citizens. Through CPDs, and other initiatives teachers will be supported to build partnership with students so that they can reach their full potential as learners and democratic citizens.
15 schools in 5 EU countries – Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland, Slovenia and Hungary – will be involved in the international project. As one of the partner organisations, HIERD will contribute to the project with creating an international web page for the dissemination of the project result, and HIERD will also host project meetings in 2017 and 2018. Researchers of HIERD will take part in the development of tools for individual paths of learning.
