The consortium has decided to apply for the Speak&Act project to address two needs arising respectively from the students – of improving their Public Speaking (PS) skills – and from the teachers/schools – of integrating Citizenship Education in their curricula applying a transdisciplinary approach. The approach adopted by the project, inspired by Hannah Arendt philosophy, combines the needs and outlines a common strategy and plan of action.
Here are the needs identified for the 2 main target groups:
SCHOOL STUDENTS:
1) improve their PS skills and foster so their self-esteem and level of participation,
2) be more aware of the role they can play within the community at local, national or EU level and thus reinforce their citizenship.
SCHOOL TEACHERS
1) explore innovative, transdisciplinary and effective ways of integrating Citizenship education into curricular subjects by learning from EU colleagues and practicing students’ participation,
2) include Public speaking techniques in their pedagogical approaches and innovative students’ assessment methods.
Indeed, the integration of Citizenship Education into regular curricula requires an important effort in terms of innovation as it is conceived as transversal to all the subjects and meant as a frame to concretely exercise and strengthen the capacity of acting as aware citizens and of actively participating to the civic, social and cultural life of the society. Despite this, Citizenship Education is not always effectively implemented at school level, mainly because it is not yet considered a traditional school subject, and there is a general lack of tools to evaluate the competences developed by students.
Objectives
Public Speaking and civic engagement cannot be thought of from a national perspective. To be an active citizen means to be an EU and global citizen. First of all, the project wants students to develop common values, discover, beside the specific differences, common roots, sharing different perspectives – not only school perspectives, but also social and historical perspectives – and so building a public space where they can get inspiration to improve their actions and local school/social policies. Creating a synergy among different systems of education will be a very important part in this process: to learn from each other and increase capacity and professionalism to work at EU level. For doing so, Speak&Act combines in the work plan a number of activities including transnational and national trainings for the 2 main direct target groups (teachers and students), content development through the testing of an innovative collaborative approach to the design of learning activities, capacity building actions mainly for students through the PS competitions, dissemination, quality assurance and impact assessment.
Results
- (Digital) training modules and materials for training teachers on the different applications of Public Speaking as a mean of developing/reinforcing 3 main Key competences which are Personal, social and learning to learn competence, Citizenship competence and Multilingualism and available in EN and in all the partners’ languages;
- A set of co-created learning scenarios, an innovative methodology for cross-curricular teaching of Citizenship Education, through which students develop new competences, i.e. critical thinking and pattern recognition. The design of the LSs foresees that they are presented with a challenge: analysing global issues of Citizenship Education, and identify the relations with the disciplines learnt every day in school (pattern recognition competence), to set the communicative goals for their speech on the topic. Finally, the students have to define which Public Speaking technique is proper the most to communicate their message to the audience (see scheme submitted among attachments). The result are didactic materials describing a learning activity to be proposed to students as part of different school subjects contributing to develop/reinforce the competences of expected Citizenship education;
- Impact assessment and self-assessment tool for evaluating the Public Speaking and Citizenship competences of students, in a scenario in which it is very difficult for schools and teachers to take into consideration key competences in subjects’ evaluation;
- Impact assessment report on the implementation of the Learning scenarios, including indications and instructions on how to adopt and adapt such learning materials based on the strengths and areas of improvement emerged during the testing;
- A public twinspace containing a video collections of the public speaking organised events, recording of experts’ webinars on PS and Citizenship Education, storytelling and podcasts made by students.