Conference Agenda

The importance of developing young citizens’ understanding of active European citizenship has heightened amid a confluence of crises in the EU in the past decade. As nationalistic sentiment and interests stalk these crises, citizens' political identification and engagement beyond a national lens cannot be assumed as citizenship education at local and national level remains limited in Ireland. A limited presence of European affairs in primary and post-primary social and political curricula has hindered the distribution of an understanding of how the EU works. In turn, this has refrained teachers and students from ‘making’ citizenship active and engaging with key stakeholders of public life, like policy-makers, NGOs, associations. Teachers of children and adolescents, who try to tackle these topics, emphasise the need for flexible, engaging, and thought-provoking resources to teach and discuss the values, institutions, and policies of European integration from childhood to adulthood.

This workshop showcases tools which target teacher and student efficacy on active European citizenship, integration and EU politics. They derive from primary (Big Friendly Guide To The EU) and post-primary (Discuss, Argue, Build The EU) toolkits created by the ‘Hub in Active European Citizenship’ in University College Cork. As resources, they have been co-created and piloted through collaborations by teachers across educational levels. They are the product of projects [Erasmus+ Teacher Training and Jean Monnet Chair in Active European Citizenship] that focus on developing political engagement with European citizenship through local and national level activation.

The workshop will be divided into three parts. The first part will focus on the implementation of the Laura Lundy model through active European citizenship and more specifically the organising of a Europe Day Festival. Workshop attendees will participate in activities, games, and creative exercises designed for giving an audience (see Laura Lundy model) to primary school children.

The second part of the workshop focuses on active and peer-to-peer learning on the EU at post-primary level. These include; artistic exercises to teach conception, simulations to teach multi-level citizenship, gamified exercises to teach citizenship and elements of EU integration, and group exercises to teach media framing. The design promotes deliberation and agonism rather than antagonism.

The final part of the workshop widens to participant reflection and discussion on the merit of methodologies used from educational and research perspectives.