The more recent debates on history teaching and learning have made explicit that democratic societies are in dire need of new forms of historical thinking and learning: Forms which are no longer exclusively legitimizing the political and/or cultural tradition of the nation state; forms, which provide techniques and strategies for developing “historical learning”, “historical consciousness” and “historical thinking”; forms which put the responsible “social subject” into the middle of historical reflection, forms which make the historical information comparable, analysable and interpretable in transnational and global perspectives and transgress the borders of national history. From this perspective, the school subject “history” is regarded today not only as a subject to give understanding and orientation as concerns the various productions of (national) historical narratives, but more than that, as a school subject to give understanding and orientation in today’s societies. The TEEM-project reacts to these needs and demands concerning topics, skills and competences, methods and material, as well as institutional structures to train future teachers to be able to prepare young people at school for a future-oriented, upcoming and diverse Europe. The TEEM-project aims at raising quality in teacher education, at fostering innovation in teacher education, at promoting open educational resources to be used in teacher education for the CHE-subjects (“Civic Education”, “Social/Cultural Studies” and “History”), at building a strategic network which gets used to collaborating in educational issues and at activating curriculum discussions on European level. The project consortium consists of six key-teacher education institutions in Europe, representing various discourses on didactics of Civic/Citizenship Education, Social Learning and Historical Learning from different regions in Europe. All of them have high-levelled skills to bring into the project concerning dissemination, impact, training, developing learning materials, research and digital education. The TEEM-project group develops three main products: 1. Five Learning/Teaching Modules (=LTMs), developed in a cross-national approach and dealing with key-aspects of the historio-political education of citizens: 1-European Identity and European Consciousness; 2-Youth Culture and Digital Media; 3-Human Rights and Values of Society; 4-Migration in a Global Perspective; 5-Active Citizenship and Social Responsibility. Although these topics have been recognised repeatedly by international educational institutions, they are not always very well established in teacher education curricula of the CHE-subjects. However, the TEEM-projects promotes the integration of these crucial topics into teacher training courses. 2. TEEM-platform, a cooperative website to foster open source education with an integrated data base for historical sources. The modules will follow a modular system presented on the TEEM-platform in a way, that each institution can construct its own module to be used in courses of Civic and History Teachers' Education. This means that via drop-down-menu content, methodology, didactic approach etc. can be chosen to build one's own teaching module. Thus, a very high transferability potential is ensured. 3. A policy paper that consists of respective guidelines and recommendations which can be applied with the LTMs and of a description of strategies for implementing the LTMs into teacher education curricula of the participating institutions and beyond. Seven different working groups are responsible for high-quality outputs of the TEEM-project: one for the TEEM-platform, one for the policy paper, five for the five learning/teaching modules. Communication will mainly be organised via digital and social media (=TEEM-platform) and supplemented by three general meetings and two additional consortium meetings (total 5 meetings). Then, there will be one transnational training activity for students and university-lecturers of the participating countries. The overall project-design consists of three main parts: 1. Working-process to develop the Intellectual Outputs 2. Evaluation, Improvement and Implementation of the Intellectual Outputs 3. Dissemination, Publication, Impact of the TEEM-project, its results and outputs. An international dissemination conference in Strasbourg in cooperation with the Council of Europe will contribute to a sustainable and wide-spread impact of the TEEM-project. The policy paper is an appropriate measure to support the implementation of the LTMs into teacher training courses all over Europe and to ensure a high impact of the project. In a long-term perspective, the TEEM-project will provoke changes in the field of teacher education, and it will contribute to develop history and civic education teacher education further and to create new perspectives for high-quality teacher education in the very important CHE-subjects.
One of the most important aims was to provide concepts and examples for dealing with modern issues of history didactics. A pool of materials and tools should be provided and be ready to be used in the different institutions of CHE-Teacher Education in Europe and beyond. Such materials include contextualised sources, plannings for CHE-Teacher Education units, didactical concepts and theoretical approaches. Such tools include an interactive platform, a digital tool for planning CHE-teaching units and a template for contextualising historical sources in a transnational way. We selected five topics, relevant for all Europeans: European Identity and European Consciousness; Youth Culture and Digital Media; Human Rights and Values of Society; Migration in a Global Perspective; Active Citizenship and Social Responsibility. The overarching goal was to gain experience in how best to compare these topics between two or more European countries, how to elaborate on the differences between the historical narratives, and how to implement them into CHE-Teacher Education courses. At an institutional level, the most important objective was the development of a Policy Paper which stresses the importance of revamping CHE-Teacher Education curricula.
The project consortium consists of six key teacher education institutes in Europe. They all identified a dire need for improving Teacher Education on the CHE subjects (= Ctizenship Education, Social Studies, Cultural Studies, History) in both structure and content with the aim of preparing young people for a future-oriented, upcoming and diverse Europe. a) International and transnational approaches in CHE-Teacher Education are rarely implemented even when it is obvious that in present times, it is crucial to go beyond a static national perspective and to strengthen multiperspectivity and transnationality. b) CHE-Teacher Education Institutes need to implement new teaching strategies which are more interactive, which support historical thinking processes and foster historical consciousness, which link first and second order concepts of historical learning, and which offer practicable tools for history didactics. c) In most of the curricula of CHE-Teacher Education Institutes, Citizenship Education and Social Studies are integrative elements of studying History Education. However, there is a lack of high-quality approaches as concerns methods and content.