Civically Active for Social Engagement (CASE) is a project that follows a cross-sectoral approach interpreted in order to collect, review and publish new and innovative approaches in the training on Active citizenship as a tear down borders between the education sectors and to facilitate a more open, innovative training and teaching. As we are convinced that participation is one of the core skills in the nowadays digital society which means to be in the position to gather information, reflect them and articulate opinion. Participation inherent the ability to conceptualize information and put them into different context. From the perspective of employability, the knowledge on how to participate includes management and leadership skills but as well openness for new ideas and concepts. Transferring participation into education means to educate self-aware citizens and gear their capacities to be Active Citizens, whom are open to new ideas, cultures and concepts and are willing to form and influence their society. Therefore it will be beneficially to create curricula, which have a European perspective on active citizenship and participation. Still each country inside the EU has different approaches, traditions and educational systems. Further on trainings and workshops exist but never been brought together at the European Level. The project seeks to create an evaluation grid for identifying best practice in citizenship building and collect those practices in a method handbook. This handbook will act as a tool-box for trainers, teacher and other facilitators in order to create innovative and tested instructions all over Europe and across all educational sectors. The project will run for two years and will consists out of six multinational meetings (each partner will organize one) as well two Training courses about Citizenship where good practice methods are presented and discussed. The project will be organized in a series of multinational meetings at every partner organization. At every meeting the partners will present two good practice examples of participative methods or used methods in defining the active citizens in addition to projects/ good practices in the field of non formal and formal education. All methods will be documented, collected and published at the end of the project. In order to identify the good practices, the partnership will collect indicators and create an evaluation grid to identify good practices. The grid and the method handbook will be open accessible and should be used by institutions from all education sectors in formal and non-formal learning. The project can be understood as a pre-assessment of the needs to create and test European curricula in active citizenship building through high level dialogue. The project target directly trainer and teacher in all educational sectors. During 6 project meetings we will work on 100 good practice examples, 12 input reports and 6 policy recommendations, which will be published in a comprehensive project eBook. Through sharing good practices of participation and active citizenship, CASE seek impact on all administrative, organizational and educative levels. We expect the participants of the project to extend their knowledge on training participation and active citizenship and how this is done in Europe. We expect partners organizations to professionalize and innovate their curricula through new methods. We expect the learner to become more motivated to perform lifelong learning and we expect stakeholders to become more aware on the need to include participatory methods in teaching and training. On the long run the projects wants to support the aims of the Europe 2020 strategy – to involve more people in lifelong learning, empower people to involve and strengthen the European society to fight back radicalization of any kind.
Through implementing this project, we were aiming to strengthen the cross-sectoral approach as underscored through the various partners and their respective priorities in the various countries. The partners, by coming together, were able to bring together their ideas, expertise and their members to the various events which allowed the partnership to jointly develop the outputs (available on the project's website for perusal and download). The partners were able to hence further active citizenship participation which is often hindered by a lack of information, communication and cooperation between affected stakeholders as well as limited access to knowledge of the options available for voicing local interests. This project aimed at reducing barriers to participation of civil stakeholders and through the provision of a criteria catalogue allowed the average user to rate and score interesting ideas to see if they would be worthwhile of adoption.
The main need we wished to address by applying for this project was the need to address and impact multiple individuals from different walks of life on the issues of Europe and active citizenship. Through our partners who are and have been continuously engaged in the field of European-ness and European citizenship, especially its impact on the civil society, we decided to embark on this project to further our current base and impact more people, especially through the sharing of best practices and experiences from among the partners and present it to a wider audience.