The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) is an important educational partner for the Berlin school landscape. The aim of the project is to firmly anchor the museum in school structures as an innovative extracurricular learning location and thus create an educational ecosystem in which various expertise is exploited and coordinated with one another – with the focus on enabling students to learn openly and participatively.
MfN resources should be made available to students and teachers and thereby support and supplement schools. Everyone involved in the project sees themselves as learners and is part of the educational ecosystem. The MfN not only invites cooperating schools to repeatedly come to the museum and to talk to employees, but will also go to the schools in order to have an impact on site.
As part of school-year projects, the museum is intended to become part of science lessons and, through its uniqueness and authenticity, to enable other forms of learning (including research-based learning, collective learning). School management and teachers are networked with museum and media educators as well as artists in order to offer students innovative learning opportunities.
Looking to the future, the "Museum in School" educational ecosystem helps prepare students for the process of lifelong learning and promote their future skills.
The educational ecosystem is currently being set up with the Gustav Falke Elementary School in Berlin and the Carl-Friedrich-von-Siemens-Gymnasium. More schools will be involved in summer 2024.
Learning in a collective
The nucleus of the new network emerged during the "Learning in a Collective" cooperation, funded as part of the "New Learning Workshop" project line of the Deutsche Telekom Foundation. A multidisciplinary team, consisting of a teacher, a freelance media educator and an educational researcher from the MfN, worked intensively with two school classes in grade 5 at the primary school at Koppenplatz Berlin.
The children thought about a learning studio based on certain criteria and brought in their own interests and the expertise of extracurricular learning opportunities (including gamification). Visits to the museum gave the children a framework and inspired them to ask ideas and questions.
The results of the nine-month project were very diverse: the children transferred content from the museum to the digital world (including the "Cospaces" platform), they designed a play and presented their results to the public in the experimental field for participation and open science at the MfN.
Project line "Creating opportunities"
"Providing young people with the knowledge and skills they need for a successful life in the 21st century cannot be the sole responsibility of schools." – With this central statement, the Deutsche Telekom Foundation shows how important it is that different learning places, such as schools, museums, libraries, makerspaces, student research centers and other educational institutions, network and work together to support students in their learning processes.
In order to implement its strategy of strengthening MINT education in Germany, the foundation is already promoting regional MINT education ecosystems at six locations in Germany.