CONTEXT European cohesion is currently being challenged by waves of populism and a strong temptation to retract within national borders, as exemplified recently by Brexit. Education is the key to raise future generations of European citizens that are open-minded, curious, tolerant, and feel a sense of responsibility to each other. In post-covid-19 Europe, such global education should be digital so that it is able to benefit schoolchildren and their families, and thus should also embrace digital citizenship as a goal. Therefore, there is an urgent need to provide the European teaching community, educators and teachers, with a set of digital tools to facilitate and enrich their experience of intercultural and multi-linguistic exchanges online. Educational material is needed to create opportunities for dialogue based on sharing what young Europeans have in common and what makes them unique. ODIMET is meant to facilitate such digital dialogue, enhance many children’s soft skills, train teachers to leverage innovative digital tools, and foster multilingualism. PARTICIPANTS The ODIMET project targets 7 to 12 year old school pupils, their teachers, their siblings and parents, as well as NGOs active in education. This project will concern two types of audiences. 15 schools, from diverse background in 3 countries will be partners for creating and testing the 4 intellectual outputs we plan to produce. Additionally, the project’s dissemination strategy is designed to benefit virtually all European classrooms willing to engage in online dialogue, including many eTwinning projects. OBJECTIVES Through the ODIMET project, we target 3 main pedagogical goals: 1 Raising global citizens: enhancing cultural awareness of diversity at all scales and its positive force, children’s capacity to dialogue, and their collective creativity and civic engagement 2 Raising global learners: increasing social, linguistic, literacy and geographical skills through interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches 3 Raising digital citizens: shaping tomorrow’s ethical online contributors, critical consumers and effective communicators. We plan to provide the European teaching community with a concrete set of methodological tools to make cultural videos, as well as digital activities available for offline usage, so they can engage their classrooms in a fruitful living-together experience with Europeans peers. We designed inclusive and modular intellectual outputs in order to help realise educational goals for all users, regardless of their readiness or origin. METHODOLOGY The ODIMET project is driven by a innovative mixt of methods, both educational and with regards to project management: 1- Design thinking: a creativity centered methodology to run collective and efficient work. 2- Agile method: adapted to the design of educational tools, to set up management and project implementation practices. 3- Co-construction and peer education: participant teachers provide feedback, share their concerns, needs and comments, to ensure the digital courses best meet their challenges, and fit the wide diversity of educational and intercultural contexts. IMPACTS Through these methods and intellectual outputs, this programme will have significant impacts not only upon the direct beneficiaries, but also on the wider education sector in Europe. Students that participate in the first roll-out of the curriculum will see increased digital citizenship skills and intercultural understanding. More broadly, educators across Europe will be able to increase their capacity to teach both digital citizenship and intercultural understanding thanks to the 4 intellectual outputs. SUSTAINABILITY This programme is inherently scalable, meaning these positive impacts will be seen increasingly across Europe as resources are disseminated, in tight complementarity with eTwinning (and hopefully integration). Additionally, the ODIMET platform will be maintained by project partners going forward to ensure the sustainability and scaling of this programme. Finally, the results and resources produced as part of this programme will contribute to the improvement of the digital citizenship and intercultural understanding sector across Europe, while facilitating multilingual communication among European youth. Results from the initial roll-out of the programme will inform not only subsequent iterations of this programme, but also other projects seeking to build these skills among different student populations. Results will also be communicated to policymakers at all levels across Europe to ensure these policymakers are equipped with an understanding of best practice in this space.
ODIMET was the first European project carried out by Par Le Monde. The implementation of this project allowed us to carry out this first experience alongside two other partners to share know-how and points of view and thus develop innovative resources on themes that were close to the hearts and minds of the three partners. This objective was achieved and we were delighted to be able to collaborate together and discover each other's field of expertise. The resources produced will enrich the respective projects of each. On the other hand, we wanted to open the pupils to multilingualism through intercultural exchanges in order to address issues that are omnipresent in today's society and that they understand the stakes in order to have a critical view. This objective was also reached through the feedback we received from the teachers who underlined the enthusiasm of the students to tackle the proposed activities, especially in the work on the symbols of their country, which many of them discovered, but also in the work on digital citizenship which allowed to better understand the habits of the students on the Internet, a subject very little addressed in class.
Education is the key to raise future generations of European citizens that are open-minded, tolerant and feel a sense of responsibility to each other. In post-covid-19 Europe, such global education should be digital so that it is able to benefit schoolchildren and their families. There is an urgent need to provide the European teaching community with a set of digital tools to facilitate and enrich their experience of intercultural and multi-linguistic exchanges online, which led us to apply. Educational material is needed to create opportunities for dialogue based on sharing what young Europeans have in common and what makes them unique. ODIMET is meant to facilitate such digital dialogue, enhance many children’s soft skills, train teachers to leverage innovative digital tools, and foster multilingualism. Through the ODIMET project, we target 3 pedagogical goals: Raising global citizens: enhancing cultural awareness of diversity at all scales and its positive force Raising global learners: increasing social, linguistic, literacy and geographical skills through interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches Raising digital citizens: shaping tomorrow’s ethical online contributors, critical consumers and effective communicators.