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Description of the Network
1.
General objective: European citizenship
COMCULT stands for "Common Culture".
The main aim of
the network is to define and promote values necessary for peaceful coexistence
in Europe and to give life and an inner acceptance to the purely legal
definition of EU citizenship as described in the founding treaty of
the European Community. Identification with common values, with the
rights and duties of an EU citizenship will be to a greater or lesser
degree a long process for all EU citizens, a process in which the cultural
heritage of each citizen is involved and which will have its bearing
on cultural particularities of individual social groups, ethnic groups
and nations within the European Union.
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2. Concrete aims
• Utilizing
the knowledge of experts from research and of already completed COMENIUS
projects.
• Providing
teaching materials to help teachers with a new European outlook in teaching
values.
• Promoting
transnational discussion and communication on questions of evaluation
and identity in schooling.
• Taking this
discussion out to the public. This is also necessary because the mass
media at present still have a largely national bias; criticism of digression
from a European canon of values is often seen as interference in the
internal matters of a member country, since a consciousness of common
values has still to be developed.
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3. Themes
For reasons of organisation
the general topic "Value orientation or Value education" has
been divided into four sub topics:
Theme 1
Common and different values in the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity
and Islam (Inter-religious dialogue)
Although the number
of Jews in European countries is relatively small after the persecutions
and mass-murders before and during World War II, there still exists
in some of them a sometimes open or under-the-surface anti-Semitism.
Bearing in mind
the catastrophic consequences of this in the 20th century, we must be
on the watch to prevent this intolerant, aggressive attitude spreading
further and possibly being directed against other religious or ethnic
minorities, in particular against Moslems, of whom there about 4 million
in France alone and in Germany about 3 million. Proof of religious discrimination
and conflict appear from time to time in the press in some EU member
countries.
This is why it is so important to intensify religious dialogue, since
European citizens' knowledge of each others' religions is extremely
limited. This is not to be wondered at, as knowledge of one's own religion
in some 70 to 80% of the European population is hardly enough to permit
dialogue. But perhaps the events of 11th. September 2001 mark a turning-point
towards a "post-secular"
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Theme 2
Integration of different
cultural and ethnic minorities in national or state majorities (Intercultural
dialogue)
The need to integrate
ethnic-cultural minorities into their respective societies already exists
today in almost all European countries and will grow even more if the
EU wants to provide economic and social security for an ageing population
with a low birth-rate. European countries do - for a number of reasons
- find it difficult in different ways to avoid ethnic-cultural conflicts
and find satisfactory solutions for integration. Acts of violence with
xenophobic undercurrents have shown that in Germany there is great potential
here among those who have learnt nothing from the atrocities of the
past. But in France, Spain, the Netherlands and Great Britain, too,
there are occasional outbreaks of massive ethnic-cultural conflicts.
This is also latent in Hungary and Bulgaria.
Some deep thinking
about the background and well-considered action are tasks for schools,
society and politics in almost all European states.
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Theme 3
Transition from
formerly socialist states to so-called post-communist societies and
to a new transnational identity (Transformation process)
The transition from
former socialist states through old or new national states to a changed
role in a future European Union meant profound changes - or in the case
of the Balkans - even war - for the countries of the former Eastern
bloc. This transition process is still under way and does not only have
an economic aspect but also deeply affects the system of values in the
societies involved. Modernists and traditionalists have formed new political
parties which sometimes are not afraid to revive national myths of history,
or even in the worst of cases to legitimize "ethnic cleansing"
as in Kosovo.
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Theme 4
Separatist tendencies,
regional and national search for identity (Regional conflicts)
Although almost
all European states have started out on the road ending in a common
"European Union", there are states, regions or social groups
that are not content with their present territorial boundaries and already
have identification problems. Or is regionalism a "defence"
against real or perceived discrimination? How can a European Union solve
such problems? One should think here of Northern Ireland, the Basque
country, Corsica, northern and southern Italy, the Balkans, Turkey and
Cyprus. In relation to this, the value of belonging to an ethnic or
national group must be discussed, or when transnational rights should
or must become the pillar of co-existence for Union citizens.
If individual member
states of the European Union already find it difficult to find satisfactory
solutions for all four topic areas, how much more difficult will it
be when common regulations have to be found on a European level. Every
large social group, whether state, union, federation or confederation
of states, needs a minimum consensus on values and rules, otherwise
it disintegrates. The discussion over war in Iraq has again shown this
very clearly. Indeed, the draft for a constitution presented by the
assembly in Brussels on 28.10.2002 gives the" preservation of common
values" as one of the most important aims of the EU (Art. 2 &
3).
From these preliminary
considerations it is clear that the COMCULT network topic is and must
be of common interest when we look at the further development of the
European Union.
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4.
Teaching and learning methods
First of all when
setting the pedagogical and didactic aims in developing COMCULT teaching
materials there is, of course, a discussion of ethical theories, whereby
teleological as well as deontological issues are considered. Modern
thoughts of communitarianism, utilitarianism and discursive ethics will
play a role in the search for the principles of a canon of values. In
the same way sociological analyses and political theories of the present
will have a bearing on the search for suitable teaching materials.
As for method, teaching
is to be carried out in three different ways:
• In traditional
teacher-oriented or group teaching, with the students acquiring knowledge
from ready-supplied materials and instruction from the teacher.
• In cross-subject
and internet-supported teaching, where students can choose sub-themes
from the whole field of the network topic to work on, individually or
in groups, and using the internet both as a source of information as
well as a means of communication with other students - including across
borders.
• In lessons
mediated by using internet. While doing so groups of students in the
network schools will compile a common product, and this will include
the making of a digital video film on the theme of the network in cross-border
cooperation. Prices for camcorders and channel capacity have changed
so much in the last few years that this kind of cross-border cooperation
has moved into the realms of possibility and is to be tried out in the
COMCULT network.
The different teaching
methods have been chosen to find out what kind of teaching is best suited
to attaining the targets set and to illustrate better the advantages
and disadvantages of each method at later in-teaching training courses.
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5.
The organization of teaching
The COMCULT network
does not want to introduce a new school subject in " education
of values", but only to combine efforts that in the classrooms
of Europe
• are only
partly seen, in particular in Religious Instruction or Ethics, and in
Civics or History.
• Sometimes particular conflict situations are dealt with in first-language
or foreign language classes without the teachers being sufficiently
trained for this.
• Mostly, however, if these things are discussed at all, it is
from a predominantly national point of view.
The COMCULT network
has given careful consideration to this state of affairs in its practical
organization and chosen the sub-topics so that they can be divided and
taught with different emphasis according to the geographical position
of the partner institutions. True, that might not be ideal with regard
to living together in the EU, where understanding all the correlations
is a necessary basis for realistic political action which does not lose
sight of the whole.
Examples will in
any case be presented to show how to promote a consciousness of a "common
culture" through a combination of aspects. Without doubt this angle
is new to education in some EU countries, but without pilot projects
it is impossible to arrive at a meaningful discussion, still less to
transnational (European) understanding.
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6.
Who will benefit from the network?
• Young people
in many European countries will gain further insight into the foundations
of our co-existence within the EU and into the significance of a common
canon of values. They will be encouraged towards independent learning
and communicating.
• Generally
teachers will have to work more in teams through the network and their
role will become more like that of a counsellor than that of merely
providing facts.
• The network is equally useful to many modern language teachers,
who depend on training in other subjects when extending bilingual teaching.
This is particularly true for all EU countries where the one-teacher
principle is predominant, i.e. in most.
• One particular
target group in some European countries will be teachers of ethics or
comparative R.I. for young people who do not attend the R.I. classes
of the Christian churches or for Moslems who do not receive Islamic
instruction. Teachers in general are not sufficiently prepared for such
teaching as the universities do not offer adequate training, in Germany
and France not even for Islamic teachers at state schools.
• Teaching
of values is not only a matter for schools. Without the cooperation
of parents, schools can do only a little and even school administrators
and educational policy-makers have to be persuaded to provide the necessary
organization conditions for the best possible education in values. These
extra-scholastic target groups will also be approached at specially
organized regional conferences through the network.
• It is more
difficult to judge the effects on educational policy, as reform phases
alternate with periods of relatively little change and these phases
are not the same in all European countries. After the publication of
the PISA study the need for reform seems to have been recognized in
some countries, so that the results of the COMCULT network could offer
an important contribution for discussion, particularly with regard to
independent learning and the curricular and scholastic prerequisites
that go with this (e.g. in so-called seminar courses).
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7.
To what extent is the network innovative?
• It introduces
a topic of importance to all for the further development of the EU into
teaching and public debate.
• It extends
the historical-political perspective of teaching hitherto to a cohesive
one for the whole of Europe, including central eastern and southeastern
Europe.
• It leads
to intensified cross-subject and cross-border cooperation in teaching
and learning.
• It demands
intercultural education and combats violence, racism, xenophobia and
social isolation.
• It explores
new ways in project teaching by using camcorders together with Internet
(ICT).
• It measures
the effects of the teaching by using tests specially developed for this.
• It provides
comparison data for the evaluation of different teaching methods and
promotes discussion of teaching methods at in-training teaching courses.
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