Since the beginning of the Covid-19 sanitary crisis, the risk of school dropouts increased. According to a study made by Synlab in May 2020, one out of five pupils is at risk of school dropout. Those numbers are even worse for pupils in priority education zones and for pupils with disabilities. Les Jeunes Européens – France, JEF Sweden, IxESN France, Starting Block, ARFIE and CADIAI want to address the challenge of the 2.0 European civic education and therefore to continue to raise awareness on European citizenship even during the Covid-19 crisis, and more broadly to adapt pedagogical methods to the digital era. “AccessiblEU” aims to give to the educational institutions of the 27 Member States of the European Union the tools to be able teaching European civic education thanks to the digital, and therefore adapt their techniques for digital education, online or for distance education. From May 2021 to April 2023, this project will aim to make the European civic education more inclusive and accessible for everyone. Indeed, 60% of European citizens feel misinformed about the European Union (Eurobarometer - November 2019). This number is increasing by 4 points in comparison with the previous year. Thanks to digital methods, this project aims to create resources, tools and pedagogical methods adapted to every European citizen, and mostly to those who feel far from European citizenship, by lifting information accessibility and EU education constraints. In this framework, several target audiences have been identified: - Teachers and educational staff of the scholar education who are often powerless to speak about European citizenship with digital methods. - People with disabilities : pupils with disabilities are those who had the most difficulties to follow online education and especially during the lockdown period. - Pupils who want to go for a European mobility (Erasmus+, European Solidarity Corps, etc.) which were and still are prevented because of the Covid-19 crisis. As a matter of fact, according to a study made by the European Commission in July 2020, 3 on 4 participants declared that their mobility was affected by the current sanitary crisis. This project aims to lift constraints upon digital European education by the creation of intellectual productions which would reinforce digital competences of teachers and educational staff in this field. These intellectual productions will be: - Train-the-trainers modules on European civic education, for distance or online learning: these modules will give teachers and educational staff digital “turnkey solutions” resources (videos, contents, educational tools,...) adapted to each educational level (middle school, high school,...) and to train teachers and educational staff to use these tools (ie. how to host and moderate an European Parliament simulation). - Pedagogical resources adapted for pupils with disabilities who suffer from a double alienation because of the “digital divide” and their disabilities. Based on European Commission roadmap for the EU Strategy on the rights of persons with disabilities 2021-2030, this project will draw from leading countries on inclusion of people with disabilities, and from know-how of associations working on inclusive education. It will then provide us with expertise to create suitable and inclusive pedagogical tools adapted for disabilities. - A serious game about European mobility: this digital resource will facilitate the European mobility awareness by proposing to the pupils to live an experience of mobility thanks to virtual reality. Based on European mobility opportunities (Erasmus+, European Solidarity Corps...), this serious game aims to make more visible and accessible international and European mobility. It also aims to raise the desire to participate in the Erasmus+ program. These intellectual productions will be created thanks to the expertise of specialized associations on these topics. They will be experimented throughout the project in educational institution partners of the project in different European countries. Each digital pedagogical resource, tool and content will be freely accessible on an online platform, available in English, French, Swedish and Italian. Some train-the-trainer sessions will be organized in each partner country to share with teachers and educational staff all these intellectual productions and teach how to use them. These teachers and education staff will then be able to host pedagogical interventions on European citizenship using digital tools, and will therefore perpetuate the results of this project.
Through the implementation of the AccessiblEU project, we aimed to overcome the lack of educational resources available to support teachers and school educational staff in the organisation of raising awareness activities on European citizenship. We particularly targeted school teachers and educational staff, as they often lack the resources to talk about Europe in a fun and interactive way. The second objective was to adapt these teaching resources in a digital format to make them accessible to all young people, especially those facing socio-economic obstacles or with intellectual disabilities. These young people have little awareness of the impact of the European Union on their daily lives, or of the opportunities for international mobility that exist, due to a lack of accessibility. By making these awareness-raising tools available, we hope to train young people to become active citizens aware of their rights and of the available opportunities to support them in their day-to-day lives.
This project was designed in 2020 by the team of the Les Jeunes Européens - France, during the period of confinement. The aim was to respond to a common need: the difficulty to adapt our tools and practices to the digitisation of educational activities. Indeed, the drastic switch to an exclusive online learning format, often led to very passive and non-interactive teaching methods. These lecture- were not suitable for the most disadvantaged groups, in particular school drop-outs (one in five according to a Synlab survey in May 2020) or young people with disabilities. This observation led to the mutual desire to set up a project with a consortium of popular education partners in 4 European countries and to respond to an Erasmus+ KA2 special covid call for projects from the European Commission to give us the means to take up the challenge of European civic education 2.0!