TEACHER TRAINING ON THE SOFIA PLATFORM AND SCHOOL TRIPS
Whether taught as a separate discipline or as a general educational objective and set of transversal competences, citizenship education remains at the heart of any public education system - and thus mirrors its deepest contradictions and tendencies.
EUStudy offered, through the SOFIA ministerial platform, intensive courses aimed at teachers of Italian schools of all levels and entirely followed remotely. The aim of said courses was to enable them to address the implementation of Law 92/2019 on Civic Education and the related Ministerial Guidelines of June 2020 with a strong support to deepen the conceptual integration between the objectives and contents of the discipline, their coherence with experimental teaching methodologies and practices aimed at the development of competences through the design of the educational context and class activities effectively set on reality tasks, the relational dynamics and organisational solutions best suited to transforming the disciplinary transversality of the subject into a shared mental habit in one's educational community. In epistemological terms, the qualifying point of the refresher and vocational training offer was the development of a problematic (aware of contradictions and therefore genuinely stimulating an active participation in civic life) and multi-scalar approach to the acquisition of knowledge and the maturation of civic skills such as identity, community belonging, legal-political-institutional frameworks, thus resulting in an approach that fully enhances the European dimension of citizenship understood as a transformative process of the civic context, both in relation to global citizenship and in relation to citizenship.
The intensive courses consisted of a series of webinars followed by guided and customised pathways through the contents of the AwarEU platform [https://vleu.awareu.eu], rich in creative multimedia materials and cooperative and interactive tools. All participants realised and documented a school trip at the end of the course with the support of the EUStudy team.
The courses and school trips involved approximately 200 teachers and 2000 pupils/students, from pre-school to first and second cycle of the national education system. Some institutions followed up the course by adopting a structured experimentation package of the Vertical Curriculum of Civic Education, complete with proposals for teaching activities, which was prepared by the EUStudy team and is made freely available on the AwarEU platform. These experiments do not end with the project and, through the platform, it will remain possible to activate further free refresher courses.
In Milan in particular, in Area 22 (according to the zonal subdivision of the Regional School Office), EUStudy's training contents have become the basis of the ministerial training course on Civic Education for secondary schools in the southern half of the city. And the Istituto Comprensivo Thouar-Gonzaga is currently carrying out a particularly organic experimentation of the operational proposals resulting from EUStudy's research and training activities - an experimentation that has the support of the project coordinators and is continuing to produce materials that can be easily adapted for any other local and school context not only in Italy.
