The MZL was invited to present its project “EU goes school – Teachers as EU-Ambassadors” (EGS-LAB), which is funded by the EU Commission, at a conference of the National Agency for Erasmus+ Higher Education Cooperation (NA DAAD).
The project “EU goes school – teachers as EU ambassadors” (EGS-LAB) aims to encourage (prospective) teachers to reflect on their attitudes towards Europe and build conceptual knowledge about the EU and how it works. The target group will also be supported in developing or enhancing teaching skills to create learning opportunities for students about the EU. In this way, the project aims to help develop a European identity among teachers so that they can plan and deliver compelling and high-quality lessons on Europe and the EU. This in turn should lead to the development of a European identity among students.
Several measures are being pursued to this end: In order to build up conceptual knowledge about the EU, an e-learning course for self-study is being developed. At the heart of the project is a seminar in which student teachers and trainee teachers work together with teachers to develop teaching units on the EU. They are supported by didactic experts from the Chair for Political Education and Didactics for social studies at the Department of Political Science at LMU (GSI). The teaching units will be implemented at the participating teachers’ schools, evaluated and then revised. A didactic commentary will also be written. The outputs will be made available to a broad public on an open source platform in German and English. In line with the principle of “train the trainer”, it is planned that the seminar participants will present their teaching units as part of a teacher training course. In this way, acquired knowledge is passed on and more and more teachers are reached through the multiplier function of the participants. This will also be promoted through the establishment of a certificate program for EU ambassadors, which includes the e-learning course, regular training and further education as well as supervision.
Due to the novelty of the Jean Monnet Teacher Training funding line under which the project runs, the MZL was invited to present EGS-LAB at a conference on November 3rd-4th 2022 of the National Agency for Erasmus+ Higher Education Cooperation (NA DAAD) under the heading “How can Erasmus+ cooperation projects contribute to the internationalization of my institution?”.
The participants’ interest in EGS-LAB was very high and the project structures and organization were praised. The MZL is therefore optimistic about future project work.