Where is Citizenship Education in the European Year of Skills ?

A project aiming at supporting educational policies
The CITIZED project aims at fostering the acquisition of social and civic competences by supporting educational policies, both in their design and implementation. The CITIZED project proposes an innovative and coherent approach of « whole school », tools for practitioners and policy recommendations. The tools have been elaborated during the project with the involvement of stakeholders of various European countries and are meant to be used by all the actors of the school ecosystem : teachers, school staff, childhood professionals, but also parents and civil society organisations. The whole school approach focuses not only on the various actors of the school ecosystem, but promote active dialogue and collaboration between all actors based on various practices enhancing mutual dialogue and involvement of all parts.

Empowering teachers and raising awareness
The project also focuses on teachers’ competences and training. Beside the whole-school approach, CITIZED is about raising all teachers’ awareness of the importance of citizenship education and supporting them in their daily practice. We delivered a set of online training modules for teachers and educators to increase their capacity to facilitate the acquisition of social and civic competences of learners. Those modules are available for free and in several languages on the website of the project.

Citizenship education : a priority on the paper, a challenge on the field
One of the main challenge of the CITIZED project is to reduce the existing implementation gaps between policy statements and daily practice in the schools. Although Citizenship Education is indeed mentionned in multiple policy and orientation document of the European Union and Country members, How can this priority be better translated on the field, and how to get the attention it needs in times of societal, environmental and democratic crisis?

The CITIZED final conference is the place and time to discuss these multiplie issues and challenges, and take some steps toward a better implementation of Citizenship Education policies for aware, responsible and engaged future citizens.

Register here for the 28th « Making schools more democratic throuh citizenship Education » session, included in the Lifelong Learning Week programme