Multifocal European Union Teacher Training

ongoing

Democracy in the European Union (EU) is facing significant challenges like rising extremism, misinformation, and a growing gap between Europe's citizens and Europe's Institutions, that are (partially) a reflect of the still not strong enough European sense of belonging. The call of the European institutions to promote education as an essential tool for the construction of a European identity is unquestionable For this reason, the Community of Madrid was a pioneer in Europe in creating, in 2019, a new subject on the EU in secondary education In the first years of teaching of this subject, experience has revealed that a new subject need new materials and methodologies, and that the strong commitment and enthusiasm shown by the EU subject teachers needs to be complemented with new didactic resources to fully reach the students and contribute to build the European identity. Moreover, according with the information given in the Testing Panel for Publications and the Teacher Testing Panel (both organised by the European Commission), there is a lack of materials adapted to teach the EU in the secondary school level. The MultiEUTT project is aimed at creating the resources and methodologies to reinforce the EU subject teaching, but also to improve EU teaching from other subjects’ angle, by developing specific materials that will address and highlight the EU values from other subjects such as science and history. The novelty of MultiEUTT proposal lays not only in the novelty of the EU subject itself, but also in the multifocal (addressing the problem from a teachers training center, but with the help of EU experts and EU information professionals), multi-level (addressing trainers, teachers and students) and multitool with traditional (but innovative) didactic materials, online training for teachers (MOOC), gamification, and global classroom projects) approach. The results obtained by MultiEUTT will improve the teaching of EU studies both qualitatively and quantitatively.