CITIZED has the ambition to become, by filling existing implementation gaps of existing citizenship education policies, an effective catalyst of a multiplication process based on teachers’ capacity building and empowerment, and schools’ commitment to engage in the “living together” side of education aims.
Reaching this level of impact will mean
- Becoming visible, relevant and credible to the policy making community in the partners’ countries and at the EU level
- Promoting a substantial improvement of teachers’ education and continuing professional development
- Providing examples of successful learning and validation paths of teachers that might inspire other teachers to undertake capacity building and validation of experiential learning in the domain of citizenship education, conflict transformation and social inclusiveness
- Contribute to the Democratic Schools Network by facilitating new schools to pilot a “whole school approach” to citizenship education based on an analysis of their own context and involving all relevant internal and external stakeholders.
Policy makers and other stakeholders
Policy makers and other stakeholders: participating in the policy making process at the different institutional levels: people that are in charge of transferring high level policy priorities into clear measures and action lines to implement these priorities, in our case democratic citizenship education.
Teachers’ training organisations
Teachers’ training organisations, facing the challenge of supporting the qualification of teachers to develop a new set of competences for the learning population, as required by policy developments, with specific reference to the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Citizenship (Council of Europe).
School teachers
School teachers, who may well use the RFCDC as a reference in terms of learning outcomes to be achieved by students, but still need specific competences on learning strategies and assessed examples of effective practices in order to achieve these outcomes: knowing where to arrive does not immediately tell how to get there.
Schools as organisations
Schools as organisations, which may need criteria and collaborative platforms to develop their specific and contextualized implementation plans, compare approaches and results with other schools and learn from one another.
Why these target groups?
- A wide variety of initiatives and good practices, some properly analysed and rigorously evaluated by showing evidence of their positive outcomes have difficulties in being transferred in other contexts and in scaling up;
- A high frequency of isolated practices led by enthusiastic teachers with the support of local NGOs, do not really involve the whole school and do not receive support by the education system itself;
- A variety of Competence Frameworks developed by several initiatives, none of which being steadily implemented by national education systems or Teachers training institutions;
- A recurring claim, by teachers and their organisations, for specific support and capacity building to face the new situations (e.g. cyberbullying, intercultural classroom, exposure to violent radicalisation and fake news, etc.) that they have to face without a specific training and/or support.