We believe European Citizenship learning is a transversal but crucial topic, especially nowadays, when we see so many young people joining radical ideologies. In this context, this project was conceived to bring European Citizenship teaching and learning to a first plan of our educational systems, contributing to increase pupils education on values, in order to avoid young people to follow radical ideals, by helping them to become active citizens who act by the European/ universal values of freedom, peace, tolerance, solidarity…To reach that main goal we intend to create a new method of teaching and learning universal / European values that can be used by any teacher in any class from 6 to 15 years old. This method will include several strategies and pedagogical materials created and gathered by partner teachers, as well as the “lessons’ plans”. At the end here will be a kind of guidebook to teach European Citizenship. We intend to “teach European citizenship and values” using new methods and ITC tools and interactive games, promoting digital literacy and to share our methods of teaching European citizenship with other teachers and other schools all over Europe. Participants will start by visiting some historical places and studying their own national legends, myths and heroes, looking for the values behind those old stories that they will compare to those from other countries and will find some similarities. They will share and present their legends to the partners during pupils’ exchanges, where pupils will participate in different activities together with pupils from other countries, in order to learn social skills and to respect differences, being tolerant and solidary... Gradually they will get to the common values that unify European Community. All participants in the project will be invited to work together, as a team, and to create a collective story about an “ideal land” where everybody lives according to the universal values. This collaborative work will be done during the pupils’ exchanges, where they will learn some ICT tools to help them with the presentation of outcomes.Project's work will be done applying for all subjects' knowledge (History, mother tong, foreign languages, ICT, Physical education...) Teachers will create, collect and organize different activities and a set of games (interactive games, board games, playground games…) to teach values to pupils and will test these new methods during the meetings. As we have involved students from different age levels, different kind of pedagogical materials, appropriated to each age level will be created. During the project life time pupils will do collaborative work as well as individual work. They will produce different kinds of outcomes that will be presented to all school community and shared with partners, as: theatre plays, comic books, e-books, paintings, digital maps, handicraft pieces… Some dances and a flash mob (for peace and tolerance) will be also organized with the participation of pupils with special needs. At the end of the project all partner schools will have a new method to teach European Citizenship, a set of games and other pedagogical materials that they will spread and share with other teachers in their schools’ regions.
This project was conceived to promote education for European citizenship in our schools, increasing education on European values, in order to form better citizens in a near future, keeping our students away from radical ideals, by helping them to become active citizens who live by the common European values like freedom, peace, tolerance, solidarity. To reach this main goal our objective was to create a pedagogical tool, a kind of guidebook with several methods and activities to teach values to pupils from 6 to 15 years old. By the time the project was thought there was no legal framework in schools to teach citizenship. This is the reason why and how seven schools from different countries (Portugal, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia) sharing the same concern and being aware of the relevance of education for citizenship and the lack of specific pedagogical tools and guidelines to teach values in school, worked together during three years to improve citizenship teaching and learning and created a "guidebook" for other teachers. The project was based on three main ideas:Diversity (learning about ourselves and each other for better mutual understanding), Unity (by learning about European common values shared by all European citizens) and Contribution for a better world by individual and collective action (being aware of each person's role on making a better world, by living according to those values). First, each school searched about its own history and culture, by studying local myths and legends and looking for the values under them; then studying local and national heroes, and visiting historical places and relating them to any national/ ethical values. This was our strategy to help students to find the European common values through the acceptance of their own traditions and cultural values. During the second and third years all partners searched, created and gathered new methods, strategies, activities, educational games to teach and learn values at school, which were written down in a common form and tested in each school with the classes involved in the project. The methods that seemed to be efficient were shared with all partners to be experimented also in other countries' schools. The most interesting activities were selected to be tried with groups of students from different countries during the pupils' exchanges in Italy, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Lithuania and assessed by teachers and participants on those activities / games. Finally, (2nd and 3rd years) all partners contributed to the booklet with the best methods and games collected and tried by all schools. This guide book with the methods to teach and learn European citizenship was made during the third year and was the main final product of the project. It was prepared in two versions: printed and digital book. This eBook was shared and spread all over the countries to be used by many schools at regional, national and European level.. This project had also a creative /artistic dimension for students, with different common activities to promote creativity and team work which produced nice material products: paintings inspired in national legends, a piece of art / handcraft inspired in culture and values (one per country), the lyrics for the project song using a Beatles' music and the creative and collective writing during all project: students participants at the project meetings worked together, as a team, to create a collective story about an “ideal world” where all live according to the universal values. This collaborative work was done during the pupils’ exchanges, where they also learned some ICT tools to help them with the presentation of outcomes. Concerning the collective story project's work was done in phases, one part during each pupils' exchange meeting and finished in Lithuania (October/19) a bit later than the planned date, because students needed more time to finish it. This story was illustrated and we made an eBook and a printed version of it. We had a strong engagement of students during the project activities, mainly the methods' experiments to which assessment they contributed to. Our guide book was shared and spread in all partner countries as a relevant tool for all teachers. Each partner school organized dissemination events (teachers conferences opened to local community) to spread the project product. Portuguese team made a pen drive containing the eBook and other project products and offered it to all headteachers from many schools of the region, who participated at the "Citizenship European Conference", organized by Portuguese School, which also made postcards with the methods written on it, to send to many schools (every school year) inviting teachers to use our guidebook. The eBook was also posted on the project web site (7colours.eu), eTwinning (my twinspace) and on the project page on Facebook. All guide book contents are printable and available to any teacher.