#ESC30: time for student centred learning!
From the 28th to the 30th of September OBESSU participated in the 30th European Student Convention organised by our partner organisation the European Students Union (ESU). ESU aims to represent and promote the educational, social, economic and cultural interests of students at the European level towards all relevant bodies and in particular the European Union, Bologna Follow Up Group, Council of Europe and UNESCO. Through its members, ESU represents over 15 million students in Europe.
During the first day of the Convention we were welcomed by the newly appointed Director-General of DG Education and Culture (DG EAC) of the European Commission which is the executive branch of the European Union responsible for policy on education, culture, youth, languages, and sport. Mrs Martine Reicherts inspired us with a speech on the importance of always aiming at high goals and fight for them. She highlighted that there is still a long way to go in order for all students to be included as nowadays students from lower socio-economic backgrounds still face big difficulties in accessing education and mobility programmes. After the Director-General we were also welcomed to the European Parliament by Therese Comodini Cachia – a Member of the European Parliament, who was highly focused on the important benefits of student centred learning. This is a topic which we tackled upon also in the following session on what student centred learning is and how it should be achieved from the different perspectives.
On the second day of the conference, OBESSU was engaged in a panel discussing “The day after the Paris Declaration” which focused on what are the things to be implemented in order to really reach inclusive schools that are free from discrimination and prevent young people from radicalisation. OBESSU focused on the importance of having schools which are safe space and which are a real space for plural communities to live together, understand and learn from each other in order to avoid marginalisation and segregation. During the panel, we highlighted the need to start from a student centred approach to make each and every individual responsible of its learning and develop citizenship skills, as from the beginning of the crisis budget cuts on education highly affected the budgets on citizenship and civic education. After this panel the Convention welcomed the Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sports, Mr Tibor Navracsics who stressed the importance of higher education in the process of social integration of refugees and its role to build open and tolerant societies as (quoting) “a good education means to determine the lives we are living and build the society we want“. The day ended with the Back to school reception, where we mingled with other organisations working in the educational field.
On the third day, we discussed the Bologna Process and we reflected on the state of play of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). During the afternoon we held two very interesting global discussions. Firstly we discussed the Post-2015 Agenda from the United Nations and in particular the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on education and how students should be part of the implementation process of this new global agenda for development. Afterwards we listened to a very inspiring speech from Karam, a Syrian student currently living in Germany who made all the way from Turkey fleeing to seek for a possibility to study. We discussed the role of education in the inclusion of migrants but also the role of the civil society organisations in building a community where we can all live together, in mutual understanding and solidarity.
These three days were full of information, discussions and new ideas for cooperation with university students in building a better education system all over Europe centred on the learner!
Written by Giuseppina Tucci, OBESSU Board member, giuseppina@obessu.org.
