Spring Day for Europe creates opportunities for teacher education institutions
06 May 2009 - General announcements
Spring day for Europe
Spring Day for Europe (SD4E) is an annual campaign that is open to all schools in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Teachers are encouraged to book one or many days in their calendar to involve their students in activities that focus on debate, interaction and reflection on European themes. Spring Day enables young citizens to express their views and make their voices heard in Europe. See www.springday2009.net.
Spring Day for Europe 2008 was dedicated to intercultural dialogue. More than 300 guests visited schools all across Europe and more than 5000 contributions showed young people’s interest in cultural diversity and intercultural communication. SD4E 2009 was connected to the European theme of creativity and innovation.
Although there is a growing interest from schools to participate in SD4E activities, the involvement of teacher students and teacher education institutions is still very limited.
Feasability study
To see how the involvement of teacher education in SD4E activities could be promoted and increased, a feasability study is done.
The starting point for this proposal is the fact that it is important to inform future teachers during initial teacher education about the importance of the European Union and how they can later on, while teaching, be involved in:
- providing opportunities for pupils and their teachers to find out about the European Union
- raising awareness with pupils about the European Union, its citizens and institutions;
- promote European citizenship education at school through traditional, ICT curriculum-based activities and/or cross-curricular or transversal pedagogical activities.
The study involved a survey using a questionnaire that was send to teacher education institutions throughout Europe.
Outcomes and recommendations
The outcomes of this feasibility study show that Spring Day for Europe is not well known with initial teacher training institutions across the EU. Special efforts should be made in the immediate future to send information about SD4E to those institutions end to invite them to be involved more actively.
However, there are definitely an important number of initial teacher training institutions that are interested to be involved in SD4E activities towards the immediate future. Even if only 15% know about the SD4E activities and even if only 1O% say to have been involved in one way or another, these are positive elements which can be built upon towards the future.
The report recommends to start a special SD4E project focussed on teacher education. Next to that the report strongly recommends set up a European wide survey for all initial teacher training institutions to find out their present involvement in activities promoting European and international cooperation. Such a survey could also describe examples of good practice that exist in initial teacher education institutions and that could be disseminated and valorized towards others.
A pilot project in 2009-2010
Subsequent to this survey a proposal has been drafted so as to set up a small pilot project to involve initial teacher training institutions in Spring Day for Europe activities in the academic year 2009-2010.
The focus will be on student-teachers developing pedagogical materials or activities to promote the European Union in its various aspects in schools or in the teacher training departments. This was strongly suggested by the majority of respondents to the survey. The materials or activities could be used by schools during their SD4E activities in 2010. A competition will be linked to the development of the materials and activities.
Information about this pilot project and the competition will be made available on the ATEE website in June 2009.
The full report can be found at the right.