What is CITIZED?
CITIZED is a European-funded project whose final objective is to develop an innovative set of instruments that will help the widespread implementation of citizenship education in European education systems.
It has the ambition to become an effective catalyst of a multiplication process based on teachers’ capacity building and empowerment and schools’ commitment, by filling existing implementation gaps between policy statements and daily practice in the schools.
The project is complementing some existing policies and measures that have already an ambition to support generalised good practices. The new and complementary components that CITIZED will develop will be immediately tested and validated by building on the existing collaboration framework established by the Council of Europe and the EU Institutions, as well as through the EIP Lab (spin-off of the UPPER project, funded by Erasmus+) and its online benchmarking system designed to compare and link schools and policy-makers on sets of agreed criteria.
How is CITIZED structured and which are its specific objectives? The project started in December 2020 (M1) and will last until November 2023 (M36). Throughout the project, the following specific objectives will be addressed:
1. Reviewing, analysing, comparing and classifying existing policy approaches to the development of citizenship education, pointing out what works where and at what conditions, thus identifying inhibiting and enhancing factors in the different contexts;
2. Proposing and testing self-assessment and self-reflection instruments and training modules enabling future teachers and in-service teachers to implement effective learning strategies, adequate to develop the set of pupils/students competences related to democratic citizenship;
3. Developing a collaborative open platform and giving access to good practice examples and methodological instruments for schools implementing “whole school” citizenship education projects;
4. Maximising the impact of the project activities in terms of support to large-scale implementation of the validated good practices.