More than a year after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the school sector is increasingly struggling to juggle between distance learning and the desire to continue to offer quality training also in collaboration with third sector organizations and thanks to European projects, in particular the Erasmus+ program.
With the project PRACTICE – Preventing Radicalism through Critical Thinking Competences, the Centre for Creative Development Danilo Dolci, together with other 6 organizations in Europe, has developed a rich set of training resources dedicated to high school teachers, in order to innovate their continuous professional development, introducing new methods, practices and tools to develop their own and their students’ competences.
In particular, PRACTICE’s training program focuses on promoting social, civic and intercultural competencies and enhancing critical thinking skills among secondary school students in order to prevent radicalization and violent extremism.
Before the outbreak of the pandemic, more than 80 teachers have been trained in 6 different European countries; the testing of the program in the classrooms, however, has undergone several stops and slowdowns, due to the well-known difficulties that distance learning has entailed.
Despite this, several teachers in Palermo but also in other partner countries have experienced the PRACTICE approach and the project partners have continued and continue to work to promote the training program and useful resources, freely available and usable online, through events, conferences, trainings and other initiatives.
Last Friday, March 26th, the project partners met online once again to take stock of the situation and plan the next steps of the project.
Just to cope with the difficulties encountered, and in order to support teachers in this complicated phase, in the coming months more tools will be developed, in order to make the use of the resources developed even easier and more immediate, even at a distance.
Guidelines for teachers and video tutorials, interviews with teachers and experts, and more will be developed!
Finally, policy recommendations will be drafted to be sent to policy makers and education stakeholders, to lobby and raise awareness about the importance of including these topics and skills within the official curriculum of upper secondary schools.
The PRACTICE project will conclude on August 31, 2021.
If you would like to stay up-to-date on the next developments of the project, please contact antonella.alessi@danilodolci.org.
To explore the PRACTICE resources, visit the website https://practice-school.eu/.