2015|2016: school student activism at its best!
The school year 2015-2016 is about to start and OBESSU is getting ready for a year full of activities and school student activism at its best!
The first big activity after the summer will be our already famous Training Course for International Officers – TCIO (6-12 September) in Brussels, Belgium where 45 school student activists from our Member, Candidate and Affiliate Organisations will meet for a week to learn about European Education Policies, the European Institutions and the work OBESSU is doing at international level. A special focus will be put on Vocational Education and Training (VET) matters with panellists from DG Employment of the European Commission and the EU-Council of Europe Partnership. TCIO is an activity funded by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Commission.
The year will continue with the hard work of the Working Group on the Review of the Manual for School Student 2015. As we already explained in previous articles, the Working Group is in charge of revising the existing Manual for School Students, updating its contents, refreshing the layout and making it relevant for the challenges and needs that school students are facing nowadays. Furthermore, the review of the Manual will have a very interesting follow up during 2016, because OBESSU will be running a one-year-long project funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe, called “Tools4Schools: Students get organised” with a focus on Active Participation and Democracy. “Tools4Schools” will include a Training of Trainers on youth participation and democracy, the development of educational materials and methods based on the content of the Manual for School Students 2015 and the Summer School 2016. By the end of 2016, an online platform will be produced with all the content of the Manual, in order to have the educational methods and materials very accessible for young people all over Europe. Keep posted because this will be a big activity during the year!
The other Working Group (WG) that will continue working very hard until the end of 2015 is the Working Group on Student Welfare. This WG is in charge of defining what does OBESSU think about school student welfare, wellbeing and social autonomy. Three case studies will be implemented: one about the situation in Spain, one about the situation in Slovenia and the third one about Iceland. The work of the Working Group will lead to the last big event of 2015, the Convention on Student Welfare, Wellbeing and Social Autonomy (2-8 November) that will take place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The Convention will be the moment where school students from all OBESSU Organisations will gather to share their perspective on the topic of student welfare. They will present the preliminary results of the case studies and will start develop recommendations on the topic to be addressed to decision-makers at European and national level.
After the Convention, the Working Group on Student Welfare will be responsible to finalise the recommendations and bring them to the next statutory meeting to be approved democratically by the OBESSU Member Organisations. They will also develop the main questions to be explored by a research that will be carried out during 2016 at European level.
And this is not all! In December there will be the Council of Members, the second highest decision-making meeting of OBESSU. It will happen in Copenhagen, Denmark and all Member, Candidate and Affiliate Organisations will be invited to discuss about the platform’s views, its positions and other internal issues.
2016 will be a busy year, as well! As already mentioned before, the “Tools4Schools” project will start in January and will last until December 2016. Several activities, meetings and capacity building activities will happen in the framework of this year-long project.
As it is already a tradition in OBESSU, we will be organising a Study Session in cooperation with the Council of Europe in the European Youth Centre in Budapest, Hungary. The topic will be Human Rights and Citizenship Education and it will explore the Charter for Human Rights and Democratic Citizenship Education from the Council of Europe as a tool for school students to advocate for better Human Rights Education and Education for Democratic Citizenship in school curricula.
Finally, if approved, there will also be a new and interesting topic popping up in the OBESSU agenda: Innovative School Methods. After a proposal from one of the OBESSU Member Organisations was approved during the previous General Assembly, OBESSU has prepared a project to have the Conference: School Methods 2020 in Spain (16-22 March). The Conference will aim at exploring the beneficial aspects of innovative school methods both for the results in education, but also during the process of learning.
Stay tuned because next year OBESSU will rock it!
