The project Erasmus+ KAIII “Co-created Education through Social Inclusion” (COSI.ed) is carried out from 2021 to 2024 in five European countries: Norway, Denmark, Poland, Spain and Portugal. COSI.ed aims to develop a comprehensive model and a political strategy for social inclusion of pupils at risk of social exclusion and dropout throughout Europe (https://cosied.eu/). The model builds on the understanding that educational staff and the students co-create as part of a community of practice.

A central component of the COSI.ed project is the Collaborative Competence Groups (CCG), which follow the project and provide input throughout the whole project. Each country has established a national CCG consisting of 2-3 pupils, 1 higher education student, 1 policy maker, 1 teacher, 1 researcher and 1 CCG facilitator. The aim of these groups is to work synergistically with all group members in contribution to running, developing, implementing, and evaluating the project. The group members are representatives of relevant stakeholders in the project. The CCG members are working together building on individual experience and competence, to raise the experiential knowledge in the project. The CCG meets three times a year during a four-year period. The national CCGs contribute in identifying needs and planning of the upscaling of the COSI. ed model. They provide feedback on the model, make suggestions for the revision of the model and make recommendations for the final model. Moreover, the group contributes to discussions and policy recommendations. The national CCG contributes to the COSI.ed model being developed in line with the national context. 

COSI.ed also includes an overarching international CCG including representatives from the national CCGs. These meetings with pupils, teachers, policy makers, researchers, higher education students, and researchers from Denmark, Poland , Spain , Portugal and Norway have participated in these online meetings. The goal of these meetings is to have an international exchange of experiences within the project. Moreover, these international meetings contribute to discussion and recommendations to the international aspects of the project.

COSI.ed has a collaborative and co-creational design with stakeholders’ participation in the development and implementation of a model for inclusion and policy development. COSI.ed is the first project to use CCGs on such a large scale. CCGs have been used as a research tool in other studies mainly within mental health- and school research (Klevan, 2017 and Krane, 2016). This approach is inspired by a participatory research tradition (Borg, Karlsson, Kim, & McCormack, 2012). Co-creation involves all stakeholders in collaborative processes, embedded in the participants’ everyday life and collaboration with people in this context (Borg, Karlsson, Kim, & McCormack, 2012). Thus, the research tradition is placed within a social constructivist paradigm. In line with this paradigm knowledge is developed and negotiated in discourses between people in the social world, social relations, and practices (Krane, Klevan & Sommer, 2021).  In this tradition knowledge is regarded as something that is created and developed in contexts rather than being “one truth” that we could grasp or discover. Active youth involvement is central in this research approach (Krane et al, 2021). At an organisational level, changes in power dynamics between care providers and children have been reported when youth are involved in such processes. At a community level, youth involvement has been found to promote intergenerational dialogues between children / youth and adults (Shamrowa & Cummings, 2017). The power relations between the participants in collaborative research is also central in a collaborative approach. A pitfall in such approaches is that there is no redistribution of power, and the so-called youth involvement becomes tokenism (Hart,1992). Both opportunities and these challenges will be discussed.

Based on the 3 year experiences of CCGs in 5 different European countries we will present different ways of running CCGs with reflection upon the facilitator's role, required arrangements, challenges faced and opportunities emerging with this approach. To discuss reflection upon the processes of running collaborative competence groups in five different national contexts within the COSI.ed project implemented in Denmark, Norway, Poland, Spain and Portugal, we found action research (Lewin, 1946) a useful approach. In this approach researcher's reflexivity is understood not only as a way of an intersubjective validation of the data, but also insight to areas not accessible in traditional research. Action research knowledge is connected to practice (Noffke & Somekh, 2009) and aims to improve the practice by its understanding (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Kemmis, 2009). The Reflection will focus around 3 main questions (What are the opportunities in running competence groups? What are the challenges in involving young people and other stakeholders in competence groups? What aspects need to be considered to run competence groups?) answered by five CCG facilitators who are key informants from the COSI.ed project. These informants have participated in semi-structured focus-group discussions. We have also done a critical analysis of documents gathered during the COSI.ed projects implementation (2021-2024). Inspired by a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), data analysis was carried out in several stages: identification of key issues during coding, in vivo coding to obtain complementary categories, discussions and reframing of categories and preparation of higher-level analysis categories essential to the presentation of findings. Based on this analysis we were able to draw conclusions and recommendations for ongoing and upcoming CCGs, including challenges and opportunities.

In this presentation we will share our conclusions and recommendations resulting from our analysis of three years of CCG work in five different national contexts. We will demonstrate and discuss experiences and solutions undertaken by the facilitators to enable greater use of proven practices of CCGs. The composition and recruitment of these groups will be presented and discussed. We will discuss the importance of a positive climate and atmosphere in the meetings, in terms of making everybody comfortable and safe in the meetings. We will present experiences in both in-person and online meetings and discuss their pros and cons. We will discuss the frequency of the meetings, communication process and how the group should be created and run in general. The aim of this presentation is also to discuss the challenges. One of the main challenges in the CCG is the power imbalance between the group members. There is an obvious imbalance between the adult and experienced group members and the young people (pupils). This will be address in the presentation, building on the experience of the national CCG facilitators . After 3 years’ experience of conducting CCGs in 5 different European countries we have experienced that CCGs can contribute to contextualize and improve the project and make recommendations more practical. Moreover, the groups have contributed to reflexivity and a deeper understanding of the topic of the project. We find that CCG is a valuable tool in collaborative research and policy development, which allows other perspectives to be brought into the project. However, it requires training of facilitators that are able to conduct and lead the meetings, address and handle the power imbalance in the group.

Borg, M., Karlsson, B., Kim, H.S. og McCormack, B. (2012). Opening up for Many Voices in Knowledge Construction. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 13(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-13.1.1793 Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2012). Thematic analysis. American Psychological Association. Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical: Education, knowledge, and action research. London, UK: Routledge. Welcome to COSI.ed project website Co-created Education through Social Inclusion retrieved from: (https://cosied.eu/) Hart, R. A. (1992). Children's participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Kemmis, S. (2009). Action research as a practice‐based practice. Educational Action Research, 17(3), 463-474Krane, V., Ness, O., Holter-Sorensen, N., Karlsson, B., & Binder, P. E. (2017).Klevan, T. G. (2017). The importance of helpful help in mental health crises: experiences, stories, and contexts–a qualitative exploration. ‘You notice that there is something positive about going to school’: how teachers’ kindness can promote positive teacher–student relationships in upper secondary school. International Journal of adolescence and Youth, 22(4), 377-389..Krane, V., Klevan, T., & Sommer, M. (2021). Youth involvement in research: participation, contribution and dynamic processes. Involving methods in youth research: Reflections on participation and power, 47-71 Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34- 46. Noffke, S. E., & Somekh, B. (Eds.). (2009). The Sage handbook of educational action research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shamrova, D. P., & Cummings, C. E. (2017). Participatory action research (PAR) with children and youth: An integrative review of methodology and PAR outcomes for participants, organizations, and communities. Children and Youth Services Review, 81, 400-412. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.08.022