CHE – Civic/Citizenship Education and History

School subjects such as history, political/civic education and/or social/cultural studies are assumed to form the socio-political identity of the future citizens of Europe. Teachers of these subjects are expected to develop the pupils’ skills and competences towards democratic citizenship, intercultural dialogue, mutual understanding and tolerance.
During the last three years, the LLL-project (KA1)“Assessment, tutorial structures and initial teacher education of trainee students in the subjects Political/Civic Education, Social/Cultural Studies and History in Europe – a comparative study” has collected data on tenets, structures and standards of initial training for teachers in the above-mentioned subjects in Europe. Members of more than 30 European universities and institutions from East and West, North and South, including the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Turkey, completed a thorough questionnaire with regard to the situation of initial teacher training (ITT) in their country.
The result is now the first comparative study on teacher training in civic/citizenship education and history, which includes not only the analysis of the questionnaires, but also the outcomes of the four thematic working groups: All partners and experts took part in this qualitative research on different fields of interest (conflict prevention – conflict analysis, interdisciplinarity – history and civic education, media didactics – media analysis, professional development of trainees of history and civic education).
The Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) has been a partner in the CHE-project and carried out quantitative and qualitative research on initial teacher training in Lower Saxony/Germany. Inga Niehaus represented the GEI in the project and organised a workshop on conflict resolution in Braunschweig in 2011. Partners from various countries participated in the workshop and presented teaching modules on conflict resolution which they developed for teacher training.

To find more information about the CHE-project, please visit our web portal: http://www.che.itt-history.eu/