INNOVATIVE AND SUSTAINABLE AESTHETIC METHODS FOR CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN NORDIC AND BALTIC PERSPECTIVES (ISAMCE)

TEN, Teacher Education Network is a network with special focus on the aesthetic subjects in the teacher education. Through the years it has successfully organized several interdisciplinary projects with Intensive courses.

The present project includes three intensive courses.
How to learn to live together? This question is now arising very acutely under the pressure of various factors such as the global and European economic, cultural, and political integration process, the ongoing migration process, and the environmental and ecological challenges.
Citizenship simultaneously designates a status and a role: The former refers to civil, political and social rights for its citizens guaranteed by the state. The latter aspect takes into account the identity and mental representations that each individuals designs for her/himself. These subjective representations may be attached to a particular region, or nation. However, the individual can also create several identities simultaneously according to a cultural and psychological perspective and then the identity is not exclusively (or not all) linked with a particular territory. Therefore, citizenship entails membership of a community or communities. Because individual construct themselves and their relationship with others in accordance with certain values, identities are brought into play in a very profound way. Examples of concepts related to moral principles and moral dilemmas: freedom, equality, solidarity, responsibility, rights, justice, rules, laws, tolerance, identity, ethnicity, religion, gender and community.
These key concepts we would like to set on the agenda the next following three years. A Democratic culture does not spread like influenza! It needs to be taught and by this very fact, it requires the commitment of citizens, educators and trainers. Our aim is to develop skills and competencies related to citizenship: the capacity for communication and dialogue, the capacity to live with others, to recognize and accept differences, sharing narratives in an aesthetical collaborative learning approach. The meaning of the term “citizenship” are open to new experience that life constantly leads us to invent, to the new forms that citizenship and democratic political life will take in the future.
1. Freedom (Copenhagen 2017, April)
Escape, exile, migration, minority
Totalitarian systems/democratic systems
Fundamental values – security, justice, etc.
2. Equality (Iceland 2018, April)
Social justice/classism: differences in economic, social and cultural capital
Globalization increasing cultural and religious diversity, multiculturalism and religion
3. Brotherhoods – Sisterhoods /Solidarity (Vilnius/Daugavpils 2019, April)
Cultural diversity, tolerance/intolerance, freedom of speech, right to be different, cultural clashes, gender questions, religion and orthodoxy, race
Prejudices and images – intercultural competence
Cosmopolitanism >