Fostering virtual exchanges in citizenship education across Southern Mediterranean

ongoing

Med-Citizen strives to enhance virtual exchanges in citizenship education through organising a series of online people-to-people activities that promote intercultural dialogue and soft skills development focusing on democratic and civic education to tackle radicalization. Med-Citizen's virtual exchanges’ model will be drafted based on design thinking and co-creation approaches. The work of Med-Citizen is based on 4 streams: The first stream, Education for democracy aims at training University students enrolled in relevant programmes (e.g., Political Science, Economics, Sociology etc.) to act as facilitators in the online workshops that will be organised in the third stream. This will take place through online workshops with professors and experts that will provide the participants the knowledge needed both on a discipline level but most importantly on teaching techniques and peer-to-peer learning. The second stream, Co-creation of a model for online building activities, will focus on building a novel model for online intercultural activities that will be based on co-creation. The third stream, tackling radicalisation online/offline, will focus on creating communities of experience, as distinct environments of discussion and collaborative interaction with students, professors, and civil society organisations from across Europe. It will organise online virtual exchanges that will facilitate intercultural learning. The fourth stream, Peer-to-peer support and mentoring will create and facilitate opportunities for young people of various backgrounds to learn from each other, engage in dialogue and support each other in their studies and future work competences. As such activities are tested in this project, a workshop for vulnerability and diversity inclusion in virtual exchange formats in higher education networks and in NGOs will be organised. The project strives to incorporate gender and the inclusion of socially and economically vulnerable poabcde