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Service Learning as a vehicle for fostering active citizenship in secondary education across Europe (SCHOOLS ENGAGE)

Third Party Funds Group - Overall project

Acronym: SCHOOLS ENGAGE

Start date : 01.12.2020

End date : 30.11.2022

Website: http://schoolsengage.eu

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• Overview

   

Project details

Short description

The SCHOOLS ENGAGE project aims at developing, testing, and validating an innovative educational package for secondary education that builds on Service Learning (SL) as a pedagogical context for cultivating citizenship competences and promoting civic engagement, participation and common values. Service Learning is globally recognized among the most effective pedagogies for building responsibility towards society and fostering civic engagement. It usually concerns the engagement of students in voluntary community service projects that create mutual benefit for themselves and community. On this basis, the SCHOOLS ENGAGE project aims at:

1. Enhancing teachers’ professional development by supporting them to apply innovative teaching practices related to service learning and citizenship education and equipping them with tools, methodologies and ready-to use materials. Teachers will be offered flexible ways of training that will enable them to integrate SL in their curricula and ensure their effective CPD.
2. Supporting the real-life testing and application of SL interventions in schools in four European Countries (Germany, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus) and as an extension increase student’s civic participation, strengthen their democratic values and cultivate active citizenship competences such as critical thinking, collaboration, social responsibility, advocacy etc. The project includes key activities: training directly through an international workshop 40 teachers and through online means more than 300; apply SL in the classroom involving more than 100 students, engage a high number of community stakeholders in the SL students' projects; reflect upon and evaluate the learning outcomes and impact on students civic engagement.

In terms of intellectual inputs, the project will result in: i) a Service Learning teachers training programme, ii) A Schools engage online course offering a highly interactive e-learning course for enabling a larger number of teachers to become effective transmitters of SL and active citizenship education practices, iii) A SL Resource Bank offering a pool of practical resources, teaching and learning scenarios, case studies and experiential learning activities for connecting students’ academic learning with meaningful SL experiences that will contribute to their personal growth and civic engagement, and finally iv) a SL Reflection hand book to help teachers collect accurate data and perform reflective practices with their students in line with the principles of experiential learning pedagogies. It is envisioned that in the long term the projects results will contribute significantly in the introduction of SL and active citizenship education practices in secondary education which as an extension will bring a positive impact upon students willingness and competences to actively and responsibly participate in society while strengthening and cultivating their common and democratic values.

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Funding Source