The acceleration of globalization has numerous effects and reaches all the way into people’s lives as well as into European classrooms. Increased migration and the diffusion of cultures lead to new ways of acting and thinking and go hand in hand with changing of local ways of living while technological advances are changing our communication. The failure to adequately contemplate these changes in the light of one’s own life leads to fear, exclusion, and passivity. Specific educational strategies build on the ideas of cosmopolitanism and are aimed at fostering intercultural dialog and the construction of new identities that emerge from the possibilities presented by our engagement with the Other, are needed. Such educational strategies can offer cognitive, affective and social tools through which to address prejudices and stereotypes and which prepare students for active citizenship in a diverse and complex society. The multilingual platform EduSkills+ (https://eduskills.plus) is dedicated to cosmopolitan educational strategies and their growing importance in the European and international context. It offers diverse, engaging and motivating materials for teachers to help children and youth understand the challenges of our diverse society and to help them refuse radical world-views. The platform and all materials are available in English, German, Italian, Polish, Slovak and Slovene. It includes three main elements: - Ready-to-use modules tackling diversity and global issues as well as for implementing philosophical inquiry in classrooms; - Multilingual media library with a collection of resources, materials and model projects from different countries; - Online video tutorials for teachers on how to use and implement the materials. Teachers can access a wealth of materials for a total of 77 school hours, based on the results of previous successful projects and initiatives of several renowned European educational institutions. The modules are designed as downloadable ready-to-use pdf files, which include lesson plans, work sheets, reading and multimedia material. A great variety of exercises was designed in order to provide the students with the tools aimed at developing their cognitive abilities, helping them to make judgements, to be more precise in their definitions and create concepts. They focus on the following topics: - Thinking - Language and diversity - Human rights - Democracy - Diversity in football - Escape from war and persecution - The workings of anti-Semitism - Antigypsyism - Islamophobia: what is it and why does it occur? - Sustainable consumption - Our products’ journey - Globalisation The aim of the project is to extend the offer of the EduSkills+ platform and develop at least 8 new modules in the field of civic and global education, some of which apply the Philosophy for Children methodology. The partnership is composed of 8 organisations from 6 countries, from the West and the East, from the South and the North of Europe. The aim of the partnership is to develop modules for tacking current societal issues from a European perspective, which can be used all over the EU.
All the above-mentioned puts pressure on schools and teachers to understand the constantly evolving global environment and prepare students for this new world. This requires development of specific educational strategies, aimed at fostering critical, caring and creative thinking, intercultural dialog and the construction of new identities that emerge from our engagement with the Other. Such educational strategies can offer cognitive and affective tools for social interaction through which to address prejudices and stereotypes and which prepare students for active citizenship in a diverse and complex society. The aim of the project was, therefore, to combine three different approaches which can offer methods and materials for school teachers and youth workers in order to implement educational strategies leading to development of cosmopolitanism, fostering tolerance, empathy, critical thinking skills, critical media use, active citizenship, understanding processes in a diverse society, etc. More concretely, the aim was to offer teachers new teaching materials covering more topics than already available on the EduSkills+ Reflections platform: There are 21 modules available now, with a total of 138 individual lessons to choose from.
The aim of the project was to further develop the EduSkills+ Reflections portal, an e-learning portal which offers teachers educational strategies for Diversity Education (DE), Global Citizenship Education (GCE), and philosophical inquiry in the scope of Philosophy for Children (P4C). The aim of the portal is fostering development of pupils’ critical, caring, and creative thinking which are all necessary for active participation in democratic processes and living together in diversity as well as, in a long-term, for a cosmopolitan citizens’ engagement. We live in a time of great uncertainty and change. The acceleration of globalisation has numerous effects and reaches all the way into people’s lives as well as into European classrooms. We see increased migration and diffusion of cultures which lead to new ways of acting and thinking and go hand in hand with the weakening of local ways of living. Technological advances and the new media in particular change the way we interact with each other as well as the way we perceive information and knowledge. The failure to adequately contemplate these changes in the light of one’s own life leads to fear, exclusion and disengagement with society and, in extreme forms, violent radicalisation.