The SCHOOLS ENGAGE project aims at developing, testing, and validating an innovative educational package for secondary education that builds on Service Learning (SL) as a pedagogical context for cultivating citizenship competences and promoting civic engagement, participation and common values. Service Learning is globally recognized among the most effective pedagogies for building responsibility towards society and fostering civic engagement. It usually concerns the engagement of students in voluntary community service projects that create mutual benefit for themselves and community. On this basis, the SCHOOLS ENGAGE project aims at: 1) Enhancing teachers’ professional development by supporting them to apply innovative teaching practices related to service learning and citizenship education and equipping them with tools, methodologies and ready-to use materials. Teachers will be offered flexible ways of training that will enable them to integrate SL in their curricula and ensure their effective CPD. 2) Supporting the real life testing and application of SL interventions in schools in four European Countries (Germany, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus) and as an extension increase student’s civic participation, strengthen their democratic values and cultivate active citizenship competences such as critical thinking, collaboration, social responsibility, advocacy etc. The project includes key activities: training directly through an international workshop 40 teachers and through online means more than 300; apply SL in the classroom involving more than 100 students, engage a high number of community stakeholders in the SL students projects; reflect upon and evaluate the learning outcomes and impact on students civic engagement. In terms of intellectual inputs, the project will result in: i) a Service Learning teachers training programme, ii) A Schools engage online course offering a highly interactive e-learning course for enabling a larger number of teachers to become effective transmitters of SL and active citizenship education practices, iii) A SL Resource Bank offering a pool of practical resources, teaching and learning scenarios, case studies and experiential learning activities for connecting students’ academic learning with meaningful SL experiences that will contribute to their personal growth and civic engagement, and finally iv) a SL Reflection hand book to help teachers collect accurate data and perform reflective practices with their students in line with the principles of experiential learning pedagogies. It is envisioned that in the long term the projects results will contribute significantly in the introduction of SL and active citizenship education practices in secondary education which as an extension will bring a positive impact upon students willingness and competences to actively and responsibly participate in society while strengthening and cultivating their common and democratic values.
The SCHOOLS ENGAGE project aimed at developing, testing, and validating an innovative educational package for secondary education, based on Service Learning (SL) for cultivating citizenship competences and promoting civic engagement, participation and common values. Service Learning is globally recognized as an effective pedagogy for building responsibility towards society and fostering civic engagement and concerns the engagement of students in voluntary community service projects that create mutual benefit. The SCHOOLS ENGAGE project focused on achieving the following goals: 1) To improve teachers’ professional development by supporting them to apply innovative teaching practices related to SL and citizenship education and equipping them with tools, methodologies and ready-to-use materials. Teachers were offered flexible ways of training that will enable them to integrate SL in their curricula and ensure their professional development. 2) To support the real-life testing and application of SL interventions in schools in four European Countries (Germany, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus) and as an extension increase student’s civic participation, strengthen their democratic values and cultivate active citizenship competences.
Fostering civic education is an important endeavour to support the fundamental values of the EU and to strengthen civic engagement and participation. The goal is to help students to become active citizens and willing and able to take responsibility. Civic education has already been introduced in some national curricula, but follows mostly traditional didactic methods, although experiencing real cases of civic and community engagement is meaningful. This is addressed by the SCHOOLS ENGAGE project using the acknowledged pedagogy of Service Learning (SL), for building responsibility towards society and promoting civic engagement. SL is still relatively unknown in Europe, its integration in schools is at a very initial stage and teachers believe they are not able to adequately teach citizenship education. The project has provided a clear EU added value by promoting shared values through education by establishing a transnational partnership (DE, GR, CY, BG,) enabling partners to share good practices and combine knowledge towards the development of a replicable model for integrating SL in the European educational systems.