A Community of Ethics Teachers in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

A Community of Ethics Teachers in Europe

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Ethics, religion and philosophy (incl. Inter-religious dialogue); Research and innovation; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation

Project Summary

Context/background
One of the main objectives of the Erasmus+ Programme is the promotion of European values in accordance with Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union:

‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail’.

Ethics education plays an integral role in the fostering of European values. However, ethics is studied within a wide variety of curricula across Europe, ranging from philosophy and social science to ethics as an autonomous subject. This fragmentation of ethics across curricula, along with a fragmentation of pedagogical methods and goals, inhibits the exchange of best practices and mutual learning, which are two of the objectives of the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (ET2020). The Community of Ethics Teachers in Europe (COMET) aims at overcoming these difficulties through digital innovation, in order to promote the acquisition of skills and competences of European ethics teachers.

Currently, there are several EU projects about ethics education. However, these projects are focused mainly on children (primary education) and adults, while there is a gap for the crucial adolescent age of 15-19 years. The COMET project was specifically aimed at secondary education (age 15-19 years) in order to reach a target group that falls between the existing programmes.

Objectives and activities
The first objective was to map the various ethics curricula in European secondary schools and to share different approaches to teaching ethics by means of an online platform. This platform can now be visited at https://ethics.community. At this moment, the ethics curricula of nine European regions are presented on the platform: Bavaria, Croatia, Greece, The Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. The data on ethics education in these regions is presented dynamically online. This means that the end user can categorise the data in various ways by selecting parameters. These parameters relate to certain elements of ethics curricula, such as (i) Aims and Objectives, (ii) Content and Skills, (iii) Materials and Resources and (iv) Assessment. By selecting one of these categories, the user can find a list of all curricular materials that are available within this category. Many other categories are available (e.g. Methods, Types of Ethics, Ethical Positions, Meta-Ethical Positions and Ethical Themes) and all of these categories have sub-categories. With this platform, we have established a strong network of ethics teachers in Europe, and by presenting teaching materials online we have been able to improve ethics teaching practices in Europe.

The second objective was to research the various European curricula by categorising the different approaches to teaching ethics. We have been able to publish four peer-reviewed research papers on this subject: two papers in Forum Philosophie International (2018, 2019), the journal of the Association Internationale des Professeurs de Philosophie (AIPPh), one paper in the Jahrbuch für Didaktik der Philosophie und Ethik (2019) and one paper in Age of globalization. Studies in contemporary global processes (2020). These papers have contributed substantially to the insight into the teaching methods that are used in ethics classrooms across Europe.

The third objective was to develop a visual language that represents the various ethical concepts that are used during ethics classes. This has lead to an icon library with two specific purposes: firstly, the icons guarantee that visitors have an intuitive user experience while navigating https://ethics.community, and secondly, the icon library can be downloaded in full from https://ethics.community/download. This way, ethics teachers are invited to use the icon library in the development of new teaching materials.

Participants
The ethics curriculum of every participating European country or region is presented online by a curator, who is responsible for collecting all relevant data about the regional ethics curriculum. We started our project with curators from five European countries and have been able to increase the number of participants to nine regions in total. The diverse partners in this project, consisting of universities (The Netherlands: Tilburg University and Slovakia: Matej Bel University), associations (Croatia: Mala filozofija and Slovenia: Zofijini ljubimci) and secondary schools (The Netherlands: Wolfert Bilingual School in Rotterdam and Germany: Gymnasium Weilheim), enabled us to create a European network that comprises the education sector at multiple levels.

Network
The COMET project has been presented at various conferences, such as the 2018 World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing (See http://wcp2018.pku.edu.cn/yw/Programme/RoundTables/index.htm – Round Table number 83) and the 2019 edition of the International Philosophy Olympiad in Rome (http://ipo2019.sfi.it). Due to this international exposure, we have created strong ties with thirteen countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine).

Although the COMET project faced several challenges due to the spread of COVID-19, we are convinced that the launch of https://ethics.community couldn’t have come at a better time. During the current pandemic, which obstructed the organisation of any physical meetings, the platform became a valuable digital infrastructure which, in the face of adversity, made international communication possible nonetheless.

Design research
In characterising COMET as a design research project, our ambition was to design a platform with the aim of elevating the level of ethics education in European classrooms. An important step in this process was to identify what competencies students are supposed to develop in ethics classes. We have found four learning orientations for ethics education:
1) Learning ethics as knowledge-oriented
2) Learning ethics as reflection-oriented
3) Learning ethics as moral judgement-oriented
4) Learning ethics as competence/action-oriented) (Kienstra 2020).
The fundamental questions were: What should students be able to do better after being taught ethics? And secondly: what exactly is needed for the students to develop that central competency? By using the learning orientation parameters that structure the data on the online platform, we have been able to develop a hierarchical model for the subject ethics in Europe, which has turned out to be very effective in answering the questions mentioned above.

Impact
With its development of the online platform https://ethics.community, the icon library, and four peer-reviewed research papers, The Community of Ethics Teachers in Europe has 1) led to better insight in the rich palette of European ethics education, and 2) improved teaching practices in European secondary schools. The fact that there are 41 countries with more than 10 unique visitors of https://ethics.community attests to the impact stated above.

Longer-term benefits
The COMET project has found a continuation in the new Erasmus+ project A Community of Ethics Teachers in Europe 2 (COMET 2). With COMET 2, we will not only expand the online platform and continue the current research on ethics education, but we will also start with the development of pan-European teaching materials for ethics classrooms. We are planning to publish a teacher’s guide with the provisional title ‘Teaching Ethics Through Debate’. This book will be available to download from https://ethics.community. As such, the networking capabilities of the platform will be used in a new way: not only for the presentation and sharing of existing teaching materials, but for the distribution of new materials as well. COMET has made it possible that ethics teachers share their materials and learn from their European colleagues. COMET 2 will make it possible that ethics teachers acquire teaching materials that are developed from the rich and diverse experience in ethics education in Europe. By introducing debate in the ethics classroom, European adolescents will increase their ability to think well, to examine, reflect, and to argue. All of these competencies are essential for the development of the values described in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 198686 Eur

Project Coordinator

STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT BRABANT & Country: NL

Project Partners

• Udruga za poticanje neformalnog obrazovanja, kritickog misljenja i filozofije u praksi Mala filozofija
• Zofijini Ljubimci, drustvo za razoj humanistike
• UNIVERZITA MATEJA BELA V BANSKEJ BYSTRICI
• Stichting Openbaar Onderwijs Zwolle en Regio
• Gymnasium Weilheim
• Stichting BOOR