DEE-GEAYS: Digital Education Era – Global citizenship Education for Activating Youth online Space Erasmus Project

Project Title

DEE-GEAYS: Digital Education Era – Global citizenship Education for Activating Youth online Space

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 youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship

Project Summary

“DEE-GEAYS: Digital Education Era – Global citizenship Education for Activating Youth online Space” idea is capitalized on the analysis of the youth work sector needs to provide timely and innovative response towards alarming environmental challenges along with the rapid and irreversible social challenges caused by the current context of Covid-19 pandemic. Recent “hot-button” switch, imposed by the pandemic, required an immediate and creative solution for optimization of both formal and non formal education: while the formal education sector managed to adapt rather quickly, the youth work is still in need to understand how to continue reaching its mission and keep bonded connection to our target groups in the context of limited interpersonal connections. Reaching young people through group learning mobilities will not be latterly possible and neither sustainable in terms of environment, we believe the sector has to reinforce the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange initiative and invest into finding innovative solutions for non-formal e-learning. Thus the DEE-GEAYS main objective is to capitalize existing knowledge, experience and creativity potential of the youth work sector for creating an innovative digital tool that will allow exploiting ICT for providing quality learning activities online.
To respond to the sector needs, the project foresees development of 4 consecutive intellectual outputs leading to the development of an innovative digital tool (IO5) – online platform that will offer virtual learning rooms for non-formal education activities with a pool of dynamic audio-visual materials (video tutorials, recordings, podcasts) that can be used by the youth workers and by individual learners. To realize a fully functional platform, first IOs are dedicated to collaborative achievement of the quality contents for the platform. We decided to focus on global citizenship education (GCE) because the concept of GCE is under the main gunsight of upcoming socio-economical global crisis: it is important to anticipate promotion of the global solidarity but at the same time, GCE that generally is considered to have 3 levels: cognitive, behavioural and socio-emotional (SEL) whereas the latest (SEL education) offers today the most relevant response to the needs of the youth across the globe who had to cope with the isolation. SEL involves the development of skills that facilitate learners’ emotional welfare and successful interactions with others, ability to cope with stress, manage own emotions and understand emotions of others – we consider this is the essential dimension of the GCE be tackled in current contexts in order to build global solidarity throughout first of all supporting personal emotional well-being of youths after pandemics.
The project foresees desk researches on GCE-SEL states of art and NFE methods (IO1) and on the digitalization of NFE (existing methodologies, available tools and best practices) (IO2) as the first phase on the way to reach its objective: creating a solid theoretical base will set up environment for the development of a coherent lab cycle methodology management (IO3), implemented on practice during 5 local labs in each partner country provided in total to 105 participants. Local labs, focused on GCE-SEL education with elements of digitalization will allow participants to enhance own SEL level, improve well-being and gather attribution to the global citizenship and solidarity. The constructive feedback from participants will allow the consortium to create quality content for the virtual library uploaded to the digital tool. A series of educational podcasts (IO4) will be implemented basing on the labs results with an aim to promote the values of global solidarity and give basic tools for those who would like to practice SEL. All deliverables, IO1, IO2, revised IO3 after the labs, podcast IO4 will be uploaded on the digital tool IO5.
Current proposal is innovative in terms of offering to the youth work sector not only ready-to-use platform for providing distant non-formal learning, but also tools for digitalization of own accomplished, ongoing and future project results in the virtual library offered by the tool. Tapping potential of the ICT is on top of current EU Youth agenda, digitalization of youth work is becoming a higher priority if we want to continue reaching efficiently our target group, especially in the current circumstances of limited mobility and limited group gatherings. The project will create an enabling environment for further quality gradual digitalization of the youth work sector in Europe. This shall support further digitalization of Erasmus+ initiatives thus also provide more opportunities to young people with fewer opportunities and contribute to the global environment goals due to consequential decrease of unessential travels, while young people will be able to still benefit from the non-formal learning being in contact with their peers from the other countries.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 192484 Eur

Project Coordinator

ASSOCIAZIONE INCO – INTERCULTURALITA & COMUNICAZIONE APS & Country: IT

Project Partners

• ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT MARKETING GATE SKOPJE
• DANISH YOUTH TEAM
• OBCIANSKE ZDRUZENIE KERIC
• FUNDACION XUL PARA LA COMUNICACIÓN SOCIAL Y EL DESARROLLO
• Associazione InCo – Molfetta APS
• ASSOCIATION FOR EUROPEAN COOPERATION DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNICATION