Civic and History Teachers‘ Education in Europe. Modules for the Development of Democratic Competences and Social Responsibility of Teacher Trainees. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Civic and History Teachers‘ Education in Europe. Modules for the Development of Democratic Competences and Social Responsibility of Teacher Trainees.

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 higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

The more recent debates on history teaching and learning have made explicit that democratic societies are in dire need of new forms of historical thinking and learning: Forms which are no longer exclusively legitimizing the political and/or cultural tradition of the nation state; forms, which provide techniques and strategies for developing “historical learning”, “historical consciousness” and “historical thinking”; forms which put the responsible “social subject” into the middle of historical reflection, forms which make the historical information comparable, analysable and interpretable in transnational and global perspectives and transgress the borders of national history. From this perspective, the school subject “history” is regarded today not only as a subject to give understanding and orientation as concerns the various productions of (national) historical narratives, but more than that, as a school subject to give understanding and orientation in today’s societies.
The TEEM-project reacts to these needs and demands concerning topics, skills and competences, methods and material, as well as institutional structures to train future teachers to be able to prepare young people at school for a future-oriented, upcoming and diverse Europe. The TEEM-project aims at raising quality in teacher education, at fostering innovation in teacher education, at promoting open educational resources to be used in teacher education for the CHE-subjects (“Civic Education”, “Social/Cultural Studies” and “History”), at building a strategic network which gets used to collaborating in educational issues and at activating curriculum discussions on European level.

The project consortium consists of six key-teacher education institutions in Europe, representing various discourses on didactics of Civic/Citizenship Education, Social Learning and Historical Learning from different regions in Europe. All of them have high-levelled skills to bring into the project concerning dissemination, impact, training, developing learning materials, research and digital education.

The TEEM-project group develops three main products:
1. Five Learning/Teaching Modules (=LTMs), developed in a cross-national approach and dealing with key-aspects of the historio-political education of citizens: 1-European Identity and European Consciousness; 2-Youth Culture and Digital Media; 3-Human Rights and Values of Society; 4-Migration in a Global Perspective; 5-Active Citizenship and Social Responsibility. Although these topics have been recognised repeatedly by international educational institutions, they are not always very well established in teacher education curricula of the CHE-subjects. However, the TEEM-projects promotes the integration of these crucial topics into teacher training courses.
2. TEEM-platform, a cooperative website to foster open source education with an integrated data base for historical sources. The modules will follow a modular system presented on the TEEM-platform in a way, that each institution can construct its own module to be used in courses of Civic and History Teachers’ Education. This means that via drop-down-menu content, methodology, didactic approach etc. can be chosen to build one’s own teaching module. Thus, a very high transferability potential is ensured.
3. A policy paper that consists of respective guidelines and recommendations which can be applied with the LTMs and of a description of strategies for implementing the LTMs into teacher education curricula of the participating institutions and beyond.

Seven different working groups are responsible for high-quality outputs of the TEEM-project: one for the TEEM-platform, one for the policy paper, five for the five learning/teaching modules. Communication will mainly be organised via digital and social media (=TEEM-platform) and supplemented by three general meetings and two additional consortium meetings (total 5 meetings). Then, there will be one transnational training activity for students and university-lecturers of the participating countries. The overall project-design consists of three main parts: 1. Working-process to develop the Intellectual Outputs 2. Evaluation, Improvement and Implementation of the Intellectual Outputs 3. Dissemination, Publication, Impact of the TEEM-project, its results and outputs.

An international dissemination conference in Strasbourg in cooperation with the Council of Europe will contribute to a sustainable and wide-spread impact of the TEEM-project. The policy paper is an appropriate measure to support the implementation of the LTMs into teacher training courses all over Europe and to ensure a high impact of the project. In a long-term perspective, the TEEM-project will provoke changes in the field of teacher education, and it will contribute to develop history and civic education teacher education further and to create new perspectives for high-quality teacher education in the very important CHE-subjects.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 369538 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET GRAZ & Country: AT

Project Partners

• UNIWERSYTET WROCLAWSKI
• Pädagogische Hochschule Luzern
• KAROLI GASPAR REFORMATUS EGYETEM
• UNIVERSIDAD DE VALLADOLID
• UNIVERSITAET AUGSBURG