UNIVERSITY

Within the framework of EUStudy (2019-2021), Francesco Pigozzo and Daniela Martinelli as scientific heads of the project have developed a theoretical and empirical research programme that will continue beyond the project itself and that starts from the hypothesis according to which educating for an active and multiscalar citizenship implies an epistemic paradigm shift, which cannot be reduced to a mere question of terminology or disciplinary content. To reason about an epistemic paradigm does not, of course, mean conceiving of the change in question on an exclusively cultural level: on the contrary, it is an integral part of the hypothesis to be explored that it is closely intertwined with processes of a political-legal-institutional and economic-social nature such as, first and foremost in the specific case of European education systems, the construction of the European Union understood as a legal-institutional framework that gives supra-national unity to the member countries.

The relationship is by no means arbitrary if we consider that state schools have been one of the crucial instruments in the establishment of contemporary nation-states. In a world that is already globalised, today's national state school in many respects remains deeply divided and fragmented politically, legally and, on closer inspection, culturally as well. This inevitably leads to a school in perpetual search of a new identity - a school that feels the need to revise and update its basic educational objectives but still remains anchored to an institutional and power structure that ultimately contradicts those objectives.

As a matter of fact, as the third Eurydice report on "Citizenship education at school in Europe 2017" (p. 45-68) also shows, citizenship education in Europe is still far from adequately addressing the extra-national dimension of today's political and civic life, however one wishes to conceive it (as international relations and institutions, as global citizenship under construction, etc.). This deficiency is implicitly indicative of an even more important "hierarchical prejudice" (the reference is to the unreflective, and therefore effectively legitimising, transmission of the idea of hierarchy between the institutional levels of representation of the multiple and coexisting civic identities of each individual) in approaches to citizenship education - it is in fact no coincidence that in the Eurydice network analysis itself, the multilevel approach to citizenship education is completely absent as an object of empirical investigation in its own right in current educational systems. And yet, despite the fact that such an approach struggles to find explicit space in the curricula or official guidelines of individual states, the competition between an "international" paradigm and a "supranational and multilevel" paradigm of the specific European dimension of citizenship is clearly identifiable in the special (and in some ways paradoxical) status that both the Eurydice report and the ministerial documents recognise for the European Union among the "international" institutions!

At the same time, various practical experiences developed, especially but not only, within the framework of the 'Learning EU @School' projects (stemming from the Lifelong Learning Programme and then consolidated by the European Union's Erasmus+ programme), have highlighted the importance of providing school teachers of every order and grade with the ability to manage in a pedagogically competent and disciplinarily plural way the very contradiction between those different paradigms of citizenship: "international" or "multilevel", as mentioned, i.e. more precisely on the one hand a hierarchical paradigm and centred on the predominance of state institutions and on the privileged conception of national identity (or at any rate of the group defined by the legal device of state citizenship), or an anti-hierarchical paradigm and structurally oriented not only to the plurality of the community memberships of each individual but also to that (under construction) of the institutional levels that represent them. Developing this competence in teachers would be all the more necessary because the aforementioned contradiction is a determining factor in real contemporary political and civic life - both at the European and global levels, with important repercussions also at the infra-national levels - and diffuses itself in multiple 'essentially contested concepts' that are at the centre of today's public debate and guide civic commitment or disengagement (examples: 'sovereignty', 'migrant', 'identity', 'security', 'sustainability', 'law', 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'equality' etc.). The school's ability to provide adequate tools to understand them, to apply them, to make them criteria for critical self-reflection is an essential part of the task of educating citizens who are aware of and actually stimulated to participation.

Scientific research in the field of education - and consequently also educational policies - nevertheless appear to be scarcely aware of this issue and its methodological implications, as can be confirmed by the "Assessment framework" of the "IEA - International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016" (p. 15-17), in which "multiple civic identities" are taken into account and represent an autonomous field of citizenship education, but at the same time are deprived of their procedural (and potentially conflictual) significance. 15-17), in which "multiple civic identities" are indeed taken into account and represent an autonomous field of citizenship education, but at the same time are deprived of their processual (and potentially conflictual) significance, since on the level of the institutional frameworks of citizenship the study does not problematise but rather assumes as taken for granted, the hierarchical paradigm revolving around "state institutions" and the model of the sovereign state, preventing empirical research from bringing out the corresponding presence or absence of anti-hierarchical and multilevel approaches that we could coherently define as the domain of "multiple civic institutions". Moreover, in the scholarly literature on these topics, the concepts of 'pluralism' and 'plural identities' are also present but to refer usually to social and cultural phenomena related to the growing multicultural or intercultural dimension of local and national communities in today's world: on the other hand, there is usually no mention of the contradictory relationship they imply with political and institutional structures based on the hierarchical paradigm.

The EUStudy project developed these lines of research through three journées d’études, publications and the design and testing of highly innovative Civic Education curricula for the first and second cycles of the Italian school system.

The main publications related to the project were:

- a peer-reviewed essay published both in english and italian on the magazine “Encyclopaideia” on december 2020: https://encp.unibo.it/article/view/10908/11965

- the column “Alla ricerca del bene comune” on the magazine “Scuola Italiana Moderna” during the entire Academic Year 2020/2021 (nn. 1-9): http://scuolaitalianamoderna.lascuola.it/it/home/archivio_list

- five interventions on Civic Education on the magazine “Scuola e Didattica” during the Academic Year 2020/2021 (nn. 1, 4, 5, 8 e 9): https://scuolaedidattica.lascuola.it/it/home/archivio_list

The curricula and teaching materials developed and made available free of charge to the hundreds of teachers and thousands of students involved in the activities remain available, again free of charge, via the Virtual Learning Environment on the EU platform: https://vleu.awareu.eu