ID PLUS intended to give 4 school institutes new to this kind of project, between Milan (Italy) and Nice (France), access to transnational cooperation while aiming at enhancing professional skills, experimenting original approaches and developing Euro-transferable products in the specific field of European Civic Education and critical pedagogy, thanks to the synergy with a Research Centre engaged in the development and testing of an original and innovative Civic Curriculum conceived in a "multiscale" key (from local to global), a network of pro-EU education professionals and local authorities committed to eco-social sustainability. From the point of view of the researcher-trainers involved from the conception of the project, the aim was to test that same Curriculum in a perspective of a theoretical and practical contribution to the development of the European Education Area, with a mixed methodology of parallel action in different national school systems and of exchange and comparison among them, with a final documentation activity aimed at producing a bilingual scientific publication.
The regulatory framework of Civic Education in Italy had recently changed (law 92/2019 came into force with AS 2020/2021), the two researcher-trainers at the origin of this project idea had been engaged for years in the development of a pedagogical approach to citizenship in a 'European and multiscale' key but, on the wave of the experimentation launched by the new law they had drawn up and begun experimenting in various Italian schools - including the two partner institutes of the future cooperation - an original global and vertical Civic Education curriculum, accompanied by teaching activities, which was designed from the outset for dissemination and adaptation from a European perspective. This initial teacher training and action-research work had been developed in the Jean Monnet project "EUStudy", which had AEDE as a partner and dissemination ally in France. The ID PLUS partnership arose as an opportunity for further development and in-depth experimentation of this curriculum in a transnational cooperation perspective and project design with two French institutes involved through AEDE. Consistent with this pedagogical approach, the project involved the local authorities from the outset.