Grants

In 2021/2022, Holistic Think Tank allocated funds in the amount of $300,000 USD towards the goal of transforming current education methods and practices by devising a new, interdisciplinary subject (IDS) to be taught at schools worldwide.

The contest was won by three teams, which received grant money to develop the curriculum of Interdisciplinary Subject. Two of them hailed from the US and one from the UK. They submitted the fruits of their work in August and we are now in the process of carefully analyzing them. We can’t wait to finally announce the results, which we should be able to do in November at the latest.
The winning organizations are: The University of Sheffield (UK), Human Restoration Project (US) and The Fab Foundation (US).



New approach to education
The grant contest was announced following the results of desk research conducted by the HTT research team. The key competencies that were the starting point for the grant teams were also the basis for our field study entitled "What school should teach - a phenomenography of school environment".
Based on the insights we gained from the project, we were able to list the areas which should be taught in schools and the resultant key competencies that students need to master. They are included on the “What school ought to teach list” (WSOT). The list included, among other things, ten areas that we see as an answer to the present-day, real-world needs of students. They were: facing challenges, functioning in relation with the world, nature and your own body, the concept of learning and teaching, functioning in society, aesthetics and cultural education, functioning in diversity, functioning in relation with the state, entrepreneurship, interpersonal communication and self-development. Our desk research laid out the challenge and we wanted the best organizations to take it on. That’s why we announced a grant contest on the best interdisciplinary subject - one which would help students develop, shape and strengthen these key skills. We are firm in the conviction that its results will have the potential to change education all over the world.



Trying to find “the culprit” we could blame for the current, sorry state of education is futile. In many places the world over, education continues to serve primarily the needs of the labor market. Thus, it completely overlooks anything and everything to do with the art of harmonious life in society, including such skills as effective communication and problem resolving. The obvious challenge extends way beyond mere changes in curriculum. Teachers need effective tools with which to efficiently transmit these (and many other) key competencies to their students. In our team, we believe that an attractive, feasible solution lies in creating a new Interdisciplinary Subject (“IDS”). Based on the holistic principles of integrating separate methods of teaching “academic subjects” and drawing broadly from the world at large, such a novel Interdisciplinary Subject should serve as a practical means of implementing the relevant principles and educating K-12 (or equivalent) students in a radically new, more promising way.



Diagnosis that has to start the change
Our field research indicated that, on balance, too many educational institutions worldwide tend to miseducate children and teenagers by using methods, skills and knowledge wildly out of touch with the realities of the 21st-century. Such outdated, inefficient and sometimes outright counterproductive methods include, among other things: rote learning, forcing students to memorize hosts of isolated facts, and drawing clear lines separating particular “subjects”. As a result, typical elementary education graduates lack scores of key competencies. Advanced as we are, our schools typically (and tragically) suffer from a severe deficiency of relevant, context-based curricula. How could they then help students hone their personal and academic skills? And if they don’t, what are their students destined for but failure and uncertain future - both personally and professionally?



Awaiting results
The grant was meant to finance the “incarnation” of the IDS course into a practical programme, including the production of materials that will be instrumental in disseminating the new pedagogical methods and research findings. The call was for solutions rather than mere “ideas”. We expected the product to be a syllabus: a comprehensive description of an interdisciplinary academic course addressed to the primary schools that, to the extent practicable, follows our holistic, interdisciplinary principles.

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Grants

Digital competence’s awareness, cooperation, and sense of empowerment. Our grantees point to the most important values in education

Three grantees are working with us to develop and implement an interdisciplinary subject (IDS). And while they share a mutual purpose – to transform the world’s education to become more holistic and humanistic – they see the critical values for achieving this goal somewhat differently. Let’s take a deeper look…

21 December 2022

Grants

IDS GRANTS SUMMARY: to design Interdisciplinary Subject

Introduction Holistic Think Tank’s mission is to make schools around the world raise learners ready for the challenges of the modern world. To achieve our purpose, we need to break away from the conventional way…

29 November 2022

Grants

Designing interdisciplinary lessons: an inspiration toolkit

As a result of research conducted by HTT in order to develop new educational solutions, we announced an international competition for the creation of curricula that take into account the need for changes in education,…

24 November 2022

Grants

The University of Sheffield on the way to IDS curriculum

The Interdisciplinary School Subject is designed to promote conscious and active participation in social life. We aim to teach children how to find themselves in relation to the world, nature and their own body and to enable their self-development in terms of personality, intelligence, sensitivity, and worldview. We want to…

23 November 2022

Grants

My media. My power. My world.

As one of the Holistic Think Tank grant program beneficiaries, the University of Sheffield, has prepared its own concept of an interdisciplinary subject, entitled “My media, my power, my world”. The aim of this subject…

09 October 2022

The Fab Foundation was formed February 6, 2009 to facilitate and support the growth of the international fab lab network. The Fab Foundation is a US non-profit 501(c) 3 organization emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits & Atoms’ (CBA) international Fab Lab outreach program. Our mission is to provide access to the tools, the knowledge and the financial means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything, and thereby creating opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods around the world. Community organizations, educational institutions and non-profit concerns are our primary beneficiaries.

The Foundation has three programmatic foci: education (.edu), organizational capacity building and services (.org), and business opportunity (.com).

Foundation educational programs and services (.edu) include bringing digital fabrication tools and processes to people of all ages, teaching the skills and knowledge of digital fabrication, developing curriculum for formal and informal educational settings, as well as designing and offering professional development training programs for teachers, fab lab managers and other professionals. We offer advanced technical education through the Fab Academy which provides instruction and supervises investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication. The Fab Academy is a worldwide, distributed campus utilizing fab labs as classrooms and libraries for a new kind of technical literacy.

As part of our academic work, the Foundation facilitates partnership and collaboration in distributed research and science. Fab labs worldwide differ widely in their settings and foci, but share common capabilities so that people and projects can be shared across them. Applications range from custom furniture and housing, to community computing and communications infrastructure, to renewable energy conversion devices, to analytical instrumentation for healthcare, agriculture, and the environment, to using rapid-prototyping machines to make the rapid-prototyping machines themselves. To augment and support research conducted in this network of community-based research laboratories, we facilitate the dissemination of knowledge resulting from innovative research, and broaden the type and nature of research projects that can be undertaken by labs worldwide.

Foundation organizational services (.org) include the promotion of digital fabrication, facilitating the development of community-based and educational fab labs, the dissemination of best practices in digital fabrication throughout the fab lab network, facilitation and dissemination of research and community-beneficial projects, the funding and facilitation of fab lab and digital fabrication projects that benefit people and communities in exemplary ways, such as mobile fab labs for emergency aid, or fab labs for developing world contexts. These services include deploying, installing, training, and consulting for new fab labs as well as programmatic support of established fab labs. The Foundation works to gather and provide critical evaluation data as well as provide tools for tracking the impact of fab labs in educational, business and social contexts. As part of our services we provide a network function for the fab lab community, bringing together fab labs around the world either physically (for annual meetings and workshops) or virtually through online tools and resources.

The Foundation’s business program services (.com) are evolving to enable new forms of economic exchange and opportunities created by this globally distributed network, facilitating an ecosystem of fab lab generated businesses and products with access to global markets. From time to time, as financial resources permit, the Foundation will connect exemplary business concepts and products emerging from the fab lab community to venture and micro-finance funding, making capital available in the right form, at the right time, and with the right terms, to help them along the trajectory of long-term sustainability.

In general, Fab Foundation provides and manages programs that benefit fab labs and their host communities, whether research, educational, or entrepreneurial, across the network of fab labs.

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The School of Education is internationally renowned for its research excellence and teaching quality. In REF 2014 The School of Education was ranked 1st in Education in the UK for research impact. We are ranked 4th overall in Education in the UK, with world leading and internationally excellent research. Our staff are engaged in high-quality international research focusing on diverse educational issues and methodological approaches, all underpinned by a commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion. We are
a collegial leadership team, providing mentoring support for colleagues at all career stages.

We have a wide range of full-time, part-time, distance and online programmes, some of them taught in international locations, making this a vibrant and stimulating environment for research-informed teaching. Our student body is growing in diversity, with full and part-time students, coming from a range of previous study experiences, from different contexts of educational practice and from different parts of the world. The School enjoys strong demand for its postgraduate and undergraduate programmes, including our innovative International Postgraduate Certificate in Education (iPGCE) – providing teachers with a deeper understanding of planning, teaching and assessment strategies.

We are based within the Faculty of Social Sciences is a large and diverse grouping of twelve departments that offer professional education alongside more traditional social science disciplines. This rich and exciting disciplinary mix encompasses both world-leading academic research and education and a strong practitioner focus in particular areas. It uniquely positions the Faculty among Sheffield’s peer institutions. The Faculty values the School for its high-impact research, strong city/region partnerships with local schools and communities, and its contribution to teaching excellence.

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Human Restoration Project (HRP) is a US non-profit 501(c)3 which aims to provide resources that illuminate and foster progressive educational practices. We incorporate progressive education as actions toward systemic change. Rather than tweaking around the edges, we must transform schools toward human-centered policies that promote well-being and learning. HRP wants to bring to light what we’ve all seemed to forget: our students, our educators – they are human beings.

HRP centers its work around four values statements:

  • Learning is rooted in purpose-finding and community relevance.
  • Social justice is the cornerstone of educational success.
  • Dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools.
  • Learners are respectful toward each other’s innate human worth.

HRP focuses its attention on systems-based change through grassroots, teacher organized change. Despite decades of US school reform (Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, A Nation at Risk), only 40% of students are engaged in high school and less than half of students feel their learning is relevant. And, despite our focus on improving math and reading scores – stressing about test results – the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists state we’re “100 seconds from doomsday.” Our priorities in education have moved away from the obvious answer: we’re all human beings, we need to treat each other accordingly.



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Get to know the results of our grant winners!

Coming soon