Why offer teacher trainings?
Summary
‘Fit4EU – Teacher Trainings for a Target Group-Specific Civic Education on the European Union’ is a Jean Monnet project that offers civics teachers four training tracks that aim to make a relevant and lasting contribution when it comes to educating target groups on the EU at schools in Germany and Europe.
A multi-module, target group-specific training program will be developed, tested in two training cycles and systematically evaluated.
The trainings’ core objectives are implemented in such a way so that teachers are properly trained, gain further profession development, and are given the tools needed to train and research on their own afterwards.
The project is carried out by the Professorship of Political Science with a focus on Didactics of Social Sciences at Goethe-University Frankfurt and is co-financed by the European Union. Fit4EU is an extension of previous Jean Monnet projects that have previously been led by the chair. For example, within the PEP project (German: Planspiele zur handlungsorientierten EU-Vermittlung in der Primarstufe) an action-oriented simulation was designed, in which primary school students get to play the role of the Council of the EU. Another one is JUMPER (German: Junge Menschen erreichbar machen mit politischer Europabildung) which aims to make civic education on the EU more accessible to young people.
Background
A substantial proportion of national legislation in the member states is the result of legislative initiatives at the European level. For this reason, the European Union has a direct influence on the lives of its citizens. This influence goes beyond having freedom of movement within Europe and the EU eliminating roaming charges. Whether in supermarkets, surfing online, or at the lake, the decisions made by the EU impact the lives of European citizens in an omnipresent way. At the same time, citizens can participate in the EU decision-making process via European participation procedures and processes, e.g. the European elections and the European Citizens’ Initiative. Furthermore, for the first time in history, starting in 2024, Germans will be able to vote in the direct elections for the European Parliament at the age of 16.
Today, it is impossible to adequately understand and teach civic education in Germany and Europe without considering the European dimension. For this reason, a contemporary civic education is needed. This becomes difficult, however, when many teachers find it challenging to teach European politics with all its complexities. To make matters worse, the dynamics of European integration quickly become outdated in the textbooks being used in schools, and the complexity of these decision-making processes is made even more complicated by the specific nomenclature of different institutions. Students are thought to have a lack of interest in and widespread prejudices towards the EU. On top of that, the quality and suitability of the material broadly available online is difficult for individual teachers to assess.
This is where Fit4EU comes in. Our project offers teachers four multi-module teacher training tracks that are targeted to civic education teachers in primary schools, secondary schools, vocational schools, and grammar and comprehensive schools, as well as an English language instruction-specific track, which is itself offered in English. By participating in Fit4EU, teachers can deepen their subject-specific and pedagogical knowledge while developing skills to provide students with an academically sound, student-centered, methodologically diverse, and cognitively activating EU education.
Thanks to EU funding, the teacher trainings are free of charge!