Low voter turnout among young people is a problem in many European countries. It may be a symptom of a lack of interest in civic engagement by people who feel disconnected from democracy and their identity as Europeans. The following projects offer teachers tools and ideas to enrich their pupils’ understanding of and engagement with their roles as maturing citizens.

Citizenship, identity and a time of political change

The Mobilise Europe = Engaging Together (MEET) project is designed to engage young people in European democracy ahead of the 2024 elections to give them the opportunity to actively participate and shape their future. It aims to:

• Provide young activists with the tools and training to become more active in their democratic participation.
• Create spaces where citizens from different backgrounds can connect with and learn from each other, acquire civic skills and learn more about the European Union and its role in their everyday lives.
• Create opportunities for young people to enter into a dialogue with politicians ahead of the European elections.

Inclusion, polarisation, tackling disinformation and social media are all societal challenges addressed by the EDUmake project, aimed at 12–18-year-olds. Partners in Belgium, Croatia and the Netherlands developed EDUbox Politics: From vote to policy, a tool for understanding how political systems are structured and policy decisions are made, and how pupils as citizens can affect change. It is available both as an individual online learning path and as classroom-based group work.

EDUbox is an innovative interactive educational format for teachers developed by VRT (the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium) to introduce secondary school pupils to a range of social issues.

Local perspectives, contemporary values

The Erasmus+ YESI project (Young Learners Embrace Social Inclusion and Social Involvement) targeted primary school pupils, teachers and local communities to teach them about human and children’s rights, open-mindedness, values for tolerance and social inclusion, and active membership in a small community. It produced a primary-level civil education teachers’ toolkit and learning activities.

Generation d-Liberation is a project that gives pupils tools for discussing the future of Europe and what role they want to play in it and empowers them to define the topics they care about the most. It produced school assembly guidelines (EN, IT, FR, HU, RO) to help generate discussion and ideas.

The Erasmus+ EVALUE project (European Values in Education) developed interactive teaching materials and web tools that match the curriculum needs of secondary school teachers and pupils on contemporary topics such as migration, democracy, solidarity and tolerance with strategies for developing their own ideas. It also produced an Atlas of European Values, which provides a broad view of the results of the European Values Study and practical teaching materials developed from the data it produced.

Language, identity and negotiation

The Erasmus+ LADECI project (Language Acquisition within Democratic Citizenship Education) developed an in-service teacher training programme that trained teachers to link their language acquisition teaching to education for democratic citizenship. It created and tested a trainer’s manual and guidelines on implementing a didactic program for in-service teacher training and other teaching guidelines and materials.

In Bremen, a conference on the rule of law brought together teachers, students and policy-makers. The day included a simulation game during which students from five schools played representatives of EU Member States, simulated a meeting of the Council of the European Union and negotiated steps to safeguard the rule of law in a fictious Member State. The materials to organise a simulation game are available in German.