Teachers play a key role in preparing future generations of transversally skilled people and are thus pivotal in the context of green and digital transitions. Despite this, teachers report a lack of professional development opportunities, esp. related to digital skills, mobility, and peer mentoring. The goal of acaSTEMy is to develop a systemic support structure for high-quality, research-based STEM teacher education from pre-service education to continuing professional development (CPD) that includes mobility as an essential building block. The project envisions transversally competent and motivated STEM teachers who are well equipped to prepare their students for future careers, the nature of which is difficult to foresee. Building on numerous previous activities of acaSTEMy partners, the focus of the project is to: (1) develop, pilot and promote various distance and blended learning models in combination with international mobility and mentorship; (2) improve STEM teachers’ digital competences for meaningful pedagogies; (3) support the competences and pedagogies of STEM teachers for sustainable and up-to-date education by developing CPD courses to address major challenges, such as environmental sustainability, green deal, global health and immigration as well as methodological aspects, such as teaching diverse classes, combating science anxiety, and fostering gender-sensitive teaching. AcaSTEMy’s bottom-up alliance brings together providers of pre- and in-service teacher education, as well as practice schools from eight (8) countries to develop and test mobility models and programmes for effective and accessible professional learning. In addition, the partnership network includes STEM teacher associations, ministries of education and Academies of Sciences to provide input for developing a policy framework for purposeful and systematic teacher mobility and to inform broader science education policies at national and European levels.

The New EU Agenda for Culture (2018) represents an exceptionally significant step forward in European cultural policy. However, it seems to us that this remarkably important new focus of the EU on the sphere of culture is accompanied by theoretical and methodological challenges, which should be considered in the process of realizing the presented goals. The changes which Europe and the world have undergone over the last thirty years are so drastic that they require a different approach to creating cultural policy. Our intention is to study how the way of life and cultural participation of European citizens has been influenced by the mega-trends of globalization, European integration and the migrations that accompany them, the digital revolution, and the rising social inequalities, and point out why this requires “social turn” in cultural policies. The bottom-up approach that we will use will also provide us with insight into multiple, often mutually contradictory, concepts of culture and understandings of societal values of culture among various social (demographic, socio-economic, ethnic, religious…) groups in European societies, and at the same time offer the foundation for new methodologies for capturing the societal value of culture. The task that we have set for ourselves in this project is to identify, through research, the cultural and social preconditions required for the goals of the New EU Agenda for Culture to be realized. This is the overall goal of our project, aimed at supporting the values of culture vital for the preservation and improvement of the European project, by means of striving to promote identity and belonging, inclusiveness, tolerance, and social cohesion. We intend to identify the elements which need to be present in cultural policies both at the European and national levels, in order to aid the realization of the strategic objectives of the New EU agenda for culture.