Guidelines for Teachers

Human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities, are values which are shared by EU Member States. They form the fabric of our Union that binds countries, communities and people together. Living these values is, however, not self-evident; these values need to be cultivated and fostered amongst people, in particular amongst newcomers in society such as youngsters and immigrants. The education systems of European countries thus hold an important role in cultivating these common European values of democracy and tolerance.

Therefore, the Ministers of Education of the EU Member States formulated within the Paris Declaration of 17 March 2015 the ‘Declaration on promoting citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination through education’. The Declaration calls for a mobilisation of the education sector to promote inclusion and fundamental values and defines four overarching priorities:

• Ensuring young people acquire social, civic and intercultural competences by promoting democratic values and fundamental rights, social inclusion and non- discrimination, as well as active citizenship.
• Enhancing critical thinking and media literacy, particularly in the use of the Internet and social media, so as to develop resistance to discrimination and indoctrination.
• Fostering the education of disadvantaged children and young people by ensuring that our education and training systems address their needs.
• Promoting intercultural dialogue through all forms of learning in cooperation with other relevant policies and stakeholders.

In addition, the European Council adopted Recommendation on Common values, Inclusive Education, and the European Dimension of Teaching that aims to promote a sense of belonging – conveying common values, practicing inclusive education, and teaching about Europe and its Member States to help increase a sense of belonging to one’s school, locality, country, as well as the European family. The Recommendation also seeks to strengthen social cohesion, to fight xenophobia, radicalisation, divisive nationalism, and the spread of fake news. It targets the achievement of these objectives by:

• Promoting common values at all stages of education
• Fostering more inclusive education
• Encouraging a European dimension of teaching, while strengthening the competence of national
• administrations in this field
• Offering a diverse range of support to teachers and educational institutions

Also, one of the objectives of the strategic framework Education & Training 2020 (ET 2020) for European cooperation in education and training is to promote equity, social cohesion, and active citizenship. It has been established on the basis that education should promote intercultural competences, democratic values and respect for fundamental rights, prevent and combat all forms of discrimination and racism, and equip children, young people, and adults to interact positively with their peers from diverse backgrounds.

The KeyCode project stems from the awareness of all Partners that, notwithstanding this strong encouragement by European Institutions on the need to act towards global citizenship and democracy education, there is still a lot to be done.

In particular, in their own contexts, Partners have realized that very often such educational practices are not apt to develop students’ most needed competences towards the definition of a more inclusive school environment. Global citizenship education, education to human rights and European values are generally not developed around emotional intelligence and empathy, whereas the Keycode Partners believe that these should be at the core of all efforts in this direction.

For this reason Key-Code aims to develop, test and disseminate active learning instruments that enhance three categories of preadolescents’ (11 - 16 years) key competencies:

• Interpersonal skills based on empathy;
• Active EU citizenship;
• Cultural awareness concerning the EU values.

Our aim in the project is to expand the curricula of secondary schools with educational experiences that enhance the key competences of pupils based on empathy, active citizenship and EU values.

Within this approach, in the present Guidelines, the Partners aim at giving to the users the possibility to understand the needs to improve education to human rights and democratic European values as an essential element to build more inclusive school environment. Adopting this theoretical approach and the methodologies chosen by KeyCode, the Guidelines include a set of activity cards that teachers can use in order to promote the development of emotional intelligence competences while educating to human rights, democracy and the respect of fundamental European values.