Building local ripples: how FEDORAS’ Open Schooling Networks are taking root

Open schooling proposes to render the boundaries of the school porous, permeable, and alive. In a time marked by ecological crises, epistemic fragmentation, and the urgency to imagine different futures, schools are called to reconnect with the world around them, not by absorbing it passively, but by learning to relate differently.

FEDORAS’ Open Schooling Networks (OSNs) have been characterised by local constellations of people, concerns, and possibilities. They emerge as living systems — grounded in disciplines, places, and relationships — where teachers, students, researchers, and diverse societal actors come together around shared matters of concern. What makes these networks generative is not only what they do, but the way they ask questions: What knowledge matters here? What futures do we want to open? What tensions must we stay with?

Across Bologna and Milan, Crete, Oslo, Girona, and Helsinki, OSNs take on different shapes. Each of them deals with different interdisciplinary themes with a tension to curriculum renewal and to rethink and re-imagine the delicate issue of assessment and evaluation. All, however, share a subtle shift in orientation: from instruction to co-design and co-teaching, from transmission to transformation. This does not mean replacing school disciplines but allowing them to be disturbed, expanded, and re-read in light of what is socially and ecologically at stake.

Each of these networks makes room for complexity, for tensions that cannot be resolved but must be inhabited. They invite students and teachers alike to step outside predefined roles, and to learn together how to stay with the trouble of our times.

Far from being a decorative metaphor, the ripple unsettles what seemed still, opens space for resonance. These ripples do not promise solutions. They make room for discomfort, for experimentation, and for new architecture of school relationships. They show that change, when it happens, comes from a series of inner and outer crossings that keep school boundaries alive, identitarian, and open.