The project ETHIKA - Ethics and values education in schools and kindergartens addresses the field of ethics and values education (by employing critical thinking approach and philosophy with children) and focuses on school teachers and other educators in order to enhance their professional development (key competences and skills) in this field and at the same time aims at policy development in this field at EU level. Ethics and values education (including EU values) is a very important aspect in the development of a democratic, pluralistic, sustainable, and knowledge-based society, both in terms of the position and the role of an individual as a citizen as well as in the area of an individual’s personal development. Research has proven that early childhood education is the most important phase to initiate a healthy development, including moral development. In several EU countries education professionals belong to the ones with the lowest opportunities for profesional development, especially in the field of ethics, intercultural dialogue and similar. Despite of the importance of the so-called inter-subject or trans-curriculum educational contents and aims (including e.g. social cohesion and communication competencies, civic competencies, EU and democratic values, respect for culture(s) and dialogue among cultures) teachers most often lack the required in-depth knowledge and competencies to introduce these ethics and values notions into the classroom. The project is subsequently related to some of the most pressing challenges and problems that permute the school sector across Europe: bullying, relations in the school community, managing cultural differences, etc., which cannot be dealt with and prevented merely by focusing on their consequences, but also addressing their roots. By focusing on the role of a teacher, the project is fostering and strengthening the professional profile of the teaching profession. The objective of the project is to offer teachers in school an accessible and effective methodological guidelines for addressing the topics related to ethics and values education, not merely in subjects that are dedicated especially to these themes, but also in other schools subject, cross-curricular activities and school life as a whole. In addition to that multiple open educational resources, accompanied by guidelines for teachers will be developed . In the project more than 200 teachers will be directly involved, 50 ethics and values education experts and researchers, several schools and kindergartens, all coordinated by 9 project partners from 6 EU countries with high level expertise and experience. The activities of the project will be centered on four main intellectual outputs, namely, (i) methodological guidelines and analysis of the field of ethics and values education, (i) open educational materials and tools for teachers and educators, (iii) curriculum and training proposals, (iv) policy recommendation paper. The methodology employed will be that of critical thinking approach and philosophy with children, and the outputs will be prepared collaboratively, in relation to the identified real needs of teachers that will be established in focus groups; all the outputs will be peer reviewed and tested in practice. There will also be several multiplier events and training activities that are planned to widely disseminate and pilot the outputs of the project. The results also include establishment European network of ethics and value educations players, including teachers, schools, experts and other organizations, that will build synergy, reinforce cooperation and exchange good practices and experiences between different players in the field of ethical education in primary and pre-primary school on local, regional, national and transnational level and peer-to-peer and experts support. Furthermore, through reinforced interaction between practice, research and policy on EU level and in national systems we expect to address the policy change needed to include more ethics and values dimensions in schools and also on faculties of educations and to equip teachers and other educators with the relevant knowledge and skills as part of their professional training. This will result in reduced problems in schools, raised ethical awareness of individuals, active and critical participation in democratic society, employability, and enhance critical and autonomous persons as a basis for civic society. The main impact will be on teachers (and other educators); the project offers them open educational resources and peer-to-peer learning methods and with this strongly enhance their prof. development in the school education sector and increase the quality and range of initial and continuing training; they will gain insight, knowledge and skills to address ethical and evaluative themes in their work in schools. They will have an established support and expert network as well as peer-to-peer exchange channels available.
With the project ETHIKA: Ethics and values education in schools and kindergartens we have developed and provides a comprehensive support to school and kindergarten teachers in relation to ethics and values education. Among the main aims of ethics and values education are to stimulate ethical reflection, awareness, autonomy, responsibility, and compassion in children, to provide children with insight into important ethical principles and values, equip them with intellectual and moral capacities for responsible moral judgment, to build a school environment as an ethical community, and to reflectively situate an individual into local and global communities. 9 partner organizations from 6 EU countries have worked together on the project that had complementary skills and represented diverse types of organizations (universities, schools/kindergartens, research institutes, NGOs). The partnership was based on previous projects, bilateral cooperation, expertise and commitment to the strategic partnership with development strategies, aims, and visions related to ethics education. In order to address the challenge of teachers often not being equipped and prepared to address ethics and values education, we have structured project activities around 4 main outputs. After a comprehensive user needs analysis that included in-depth focus groups we developed a Manual for teachers and educators presenting 13 methodological approaches to ethics and values education including practical examples and useful tips. The manual also contains a description of basic approaches in ethics education and key insights into the moral development of children. It represents a useful tool to be used in classrooms as well as for teacher/educator training. The second outputs are Educational materials and tools for ethics and values education. These are prepared according to the age levels of students (3-5, 5-7, 7-9, 9-11 and 11-14 years) and six key themes identified as the most relevant (justice, respect, responsibility, self-esteem, conflict resolution, ethical actions). They can be adapted given the specific aims of a teacher and the context. The third output is a Curriculum proposal for ethics and values education for teachers and educators. It is aimed both to developers and implementers of ethics and values education training as well as a self-study guide. It includes descriptions of various approaches to ethics and values education and an overview of the existing models. The 3 curriculum pillars that we have identified as key are Philosophy with children and critical thinking, Ethics and values education: methods and tools, and Ethical aspects and challenges of the contemporary world (and how to address them in the classroom). The fourth output is the Policy paper on ethics and values education in EU that provides comprehensive support to policy- and decision-makers for the domain of education (both at the EU level as well as on the level of member states) regarding various dimensions of ethics education. The paper addresses the importance and aims of ethics education, the state of the art, main challenges, and puts forward effective, needs-based and sustainable cluster of policy recommendations. In addition to the outputs, we carried out 3 comprehensive training activities. Within the project, we have reached more than 250 teachers with our training/learning activities, while the number of teachers reached with our educational materials exceeded 1700. The number of schools, institutions, and networks of organizations of teachers and educators that was be involved within the project lifetime was 591 and out of these 33 are now members of a network for ethics and values education. The number of general public reached by the media as part of raising the awareness was over 3 million. We contacted 3323 policy-/decision-makers. We have also produced 18 expert articles. We have provided teachers and educators with new opportunities for learning about ethics education and also made a push towards more systemic change to include these topics and approaches into their initial education. As part of the impact and sustainability activities, we have managed to secure follow-up projects. One of these (Little - Learn Together to Live Together) will use the outputs developed and transform them into online courses for teachers in 4 languages and will encompass a wide network of schools. The other will address the ethics educations as part of sports education. In future, we aim to build further synergy, reinforce cooperation, and exchange good practices between different players in the field of ethical education and peer-to-peer and experts support. That is why we have established a European network for ethics and value educations that will be led by the University of Ljubljana. With this, we will enhance innovation and internationalization in the school sector and strengthen cooperation and capacity building in the field of ethics and values education.