EU-SIDE – Cascading Event at TUS

How can schools respond to increasingly complex social challenges while also creating meaningful opportunities for participation, agency, and democratic engagement?

This question sat at the heart of a recent EU-SIDE cascading event hosted at Technological University of the Shannon (TUS), Athlone. Bringing together primary teachers, secondary teachers, and school leaders from across Ireland, the programme marked an important milestone for the project as an EU-SIDE cascading event. Entitled Tension, Trust and Inquiry: Building TRUST for Social Innovation in Schools, the two-day programme invited participants to rethink where innovation begins. Rather than starting with ready-made solutions, participants were encouraged to begin with tensions: the authentic challenges, frustrations, needs, and opportunities emerging within their schools, classrooms, and communities.

From Replication to Cascading Practice

As a cascading event, the programme was significant not only for its content, but also for its role in extending and adapting earlier project learning into a new context. Drawing on insights from previous SAP and BIP experiences across the partnership, the event demonstrated how ideas developed within EU-SIDE can be reinterpreted and applied through local educational practice. In this sense, the programme was not simply a repeat delivery of an earlier model. It represented a process of cascading: taking emerging project knowledge, pedagogical approaches, and competence frameworks, and mobilising them through new groups of educators who can further adapt, apply, and extend them in their own schools and settings.

Starting Where Real Change Begins

Across the two days, teachers and school leaders identified challenges connected to SEN and AEN inclusion, diversity, student voice, leadership, community participation, and supporting positive outcomes for learners. These were not treated as problems requiring immediate fixes. Instead, they became starting points for dialogue, reflection, and collaborative exploration. This emphasis on inquiry before intervention became a defining feature of the programme. In doing so, the event modelled an important principle for cascading activity within EU-SIDE: if social innovation is to be meaningful in practice, it must begin with the realities educators and learners are actually facing, rather than with generic solutions applied from the outside.

Building Trust Through Participation

The cascading event was grounded in the conceptual TRUST Framework and the EU-SIDE Social Innovation Competences. Central to both is the belief that meaningful educational innovation requires more than new ideas. It requires the relational conditions that allow participation, dialogue, inclusion, and collaboration to flourish.

Across the programme, participants engaged in empathy mapping, stakeholder analysis, journey mapping, and structured inquiry activities designed to deepen their understanding of the people and communities connected to the tensions they had identified.

Rather than asking participants to rush toward solutions, the programme encouraged them to slow down, explore different perspectives, and better understand the experiences of those affected. This created rich discussion around empathy, inclusion, participation, and educational responsibility. It also surfaced an important insight: not every tension can be solved quickly, but every tension can be explored more thoughtfully. That shift in perspective captures a key idea at the heart of both social innovation and cascade work.

From Understanding to Action

Once participants had explored their tensions through an inquiry lens, attention shifted towards collaborative design and response development. Using How Might We questioning and Crazy 8s ideation activities, participants worked together to generate possible responses to the educational challenges they had identified. These activities encouraged creative thinking while maintaining a strong connection to the needs, perspectives, and lived experiences uncovered during the earlier stages of the process.

Ideas were then developed into early-stage prototypes and implementation concepts that could be adapted for use within schools and communities. Importantly, the emphasis remained on experimentation rather than perfection. Participants were encouraged to test ideas, receive feedback, refine concepts, and view innovation as an iterative process rather than a finished product. This was particularly important in the context of the event as a cascading activity. The goal was not simply to deliver a training programme, but to build educators’ confidence and capacity to carry forward key project ideas in ways that are adaptable, usable, and open to revision within their own practice.

Exploring the Potential of AI in Education

One of the most engaging elements of the programme involved the use of AI-supported prototyping tools. Participants explored how AI could be used to rapidly generate high-fidelity HTML-based prototypes connected to their ideas and projects. Rather than positioning AI as a technological novelty, the session demonstrated how educators can use emerging tools to visualise concepts, communicate ideas, and quickly develop resources that support learning, participation, and innovation. At the same time, the programme maintained a critical stance: technology alone is not innovation. AI was presented as a support tool that can assist inquiry, creativity, and collaborative problem-solving when used thoughtfully and purposefully within an educational process.

Building Confidence for Implementation

Evaluation data collected before and after the programme indicated positive developments in participant confidence across a number of areas connected to social innovation and inquiry-based learning.

Participants reported increased confidence in:

• facilitating inquiry processes
• supporting collaborative problem-solving
• using design thinking approaches
• developing and testing ideas through prototyping
• identifying and exploring authentic tensions
• implementing social innovation approaches within educational contexts

Perhaps most significantly, participants showed a shift from viewing social innovation as a broad and somewhat abstract concept towards understanding it as a practical pedagogical process. By the end of the event, many were discussing social innovation through the language of inquiry, empathy, participation, prototyping, implementation, and collaboration. This movement from conceptual awareness towards practical application is especially important for cascading work. The success of a cascading event is not only measured by participant enjoyment or engagement, but by whether educators leave with greater clarity, confidence, and readiness to apply what they have learned in their own settings.

A First Step in the Cascade

As an EU-SIDE cascading event, Tension, Trust and Inquiry: Building TRUST for Social Innovation in Schools marked an important transition point for the project. It showed how shared European learning can begin to travel outward through local adaptation, professional dialogue, and teacher-led implementation.

The event demonstrated that cascading is not simply about reproducing content. It is about building capacity, translating ideas into practice, and enabling educators to become active carriers of social innovation within their own contexts.

In that sense, the programme offered more than a two-day training experience. It provided a starting point for future implementation, experimentation, and reflection in schools, while also showing how the TRUST Framework can support educators in moving from real tensions to meaningful change.