Working Group on the review of the Manual for School Students 2015
From the 10th to the 13th of April, the kick-off meeting of the Working Group on the review of the Manual for School Students 2015 was held in Vienna. The Working Group, which will last until the end of 2015, gathers three representatives of OBESSU Member Organisations and a Board Member, with the support of the OBESSU Communication and Membership Officer.
In 2007, in co-operation with the Council of Europe, OBESSU published a Manual for School Students to introduce school students to the work of a school student organisation with all its different aspects: from the birth to further developments, from economic management to planning events, from students’ leadership to media-handling.
This Manual has been a great tool for both newly established and more experienced OBESSU Member and Candidate Organisations. After nine years, we believe that to keep the Manual up-to-date and alive, a revision is needed.
This is the reason why OBESSU has decided to establish a Working Group to “review the Manual for School Students and adapt what is outdated or missing, to guarantee the Manual stays a useful tool for School Students in Europe” – OBESSU Workplan 2015-2017.
In this framework, the Working Group (WG) met in Vienna and worked hard for two days to develop the best strategies to create and implement a new updated tool aiming to help students to get organised and to facilitate the birth and the growth of student movements.
On the first day, after having set some rules to follow and decided the working method to use within the WG, the team focused on aims and objectives of the new Manual for School Students. Why a Manual? Who is this Manual for? How should be the perfect Manual and how it should be structured? These are some of the questions the WG brainstormed and discussed over the first day.
On the second day, the WG worked in groups and individually on the structure of the new Manual, discussing the different chapters and sections, and finally coming up with a new concept and index. Moreover, the WG Members set the timeline for the next months with deadlines for both face-to-face and online group meetings, and agreed on tasks division.
The main challenge of the Working Group is to create and develop an easy-to-read Manual which contains useful information and details to empower school students as relevant stakeholders of their educational systems and to educate school students to democratic and active participation. Furthermore, the Manual should provide local and national student organisations with the tools to reach out to grassroots and support the development of new school student structures. In other words, the main aim of the Manual for School Students 2015 is to have a tool to encourage student activism all over Europe and beyond.
Keep an eye on the future Working Group activities, check out the WG webpage and follow further developments at #WGManual.
For further information please contact OBESSU Board Member Giuseppina Tucci at giuseppina@obessu.org.
