Policy Implementation support and teacher empowerment for CITIZenship EDucation (2020–2023)

The CITIZED project aims to support educational policies directed towards “enhancing the acquisition of social and civic competences”. It will develop an innovative set of instruments that will help the widespread implementation of citizenship education in European Secondary Schools, to the benefit of all students, and particularly of those who, for any reason, risk to be discriminated or socially excluded.

Project website: www.politik-lernen.at/citized | https://www.citized.eu/

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CITIZED has the ambition to become, by filling existing implementation gaps between policy statements and daily practice in the schools, 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.

The innovation approach proposed by this project is not based on the generation of something absolutely unprecedented in its content, but on:

• Integration of existing elements, coming from existing policy initiatives and previous projects on the same theme, but also development of “missing elements” that will facilitate policy implementation;
• Process innovation, by bringing the issue of teachers training for democratic citizenship competences in a multi-stakeholder transnational debate involving policy makers, teacher training institutions, teachers and families and reviewing international good practices in view of its potential transferability;
• Co-creation of innovative instruments and approaches to contextualise existing models.

Its specific objectives are:

1. Reviewing, analysing, comparing and classifying existing policy approaches to the development of citizenship education (with a specific reference to how teachers and schools are prepared and supported to implement the respective policies), pointing out what works where and at what conditions, thus identifying inhibiting and enhancing factors in the different contexts;
2. Proposing and testing self-assessment instruments and training modules enabling future teachers and in-service teachers to implement effective learning strategies, adequate to develop the set of pupils/students competences related to democratic citizenship: this will be done by using the work of the Council of Europe as a reference for context-based national and local strategies;
3. Developing a collaborative open platform and giving access to good practice examples and methodological instruments for schools implementing “whole school” citizenship education projects; also in this case a key reference will be the “Democratic Schools Network” approach;
4. Maximising the impact of the project activities in terms of support to large scale implementation of the validated good practices.

The project partners: