citizenship education

In recent years, populist and right-wing parties, as well as ultra-conservative and eurosceptic movements, have experienced a massive surge all across Europe. Viktor Orbans Fidesz in Hungary, the Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden, the Front National in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. How can citizenship education respond to these developments? What causes of populism can we identify in the first place? The workshop with Nick Startin and Ivan Krastnev, hosted by Caroline Hornstein Tomic set out to discuss these questions.

Nicholas Startin on the rise of populism in Europe and the question of how citizenship education should respond to Euroscepticism and populistic currents.

Kris Grimonprez about values in citizenship education, the connection between European values and European law and the role of storytelling.

Lynn Davies, Professor Emeritus at the Universtiy of Birmingham, about how citizenship education should deal with conflict and violence and whether there has ever been something like a normative European platform to 'disintegrate' from.

Ludwig Adamovich junior, former president of the Austrian Constitutional Court and legal advisor to the Federal President of Austria on the importance of NECE for forming a sense of European citizenship.

Who are ´Hard-to-reach learners´ (HTR)? A simple working definition may be: Educationally and/or socially and/or economically disadvantaged people who are often forgotten by the mainstream of citizenship education or left behind in schools or other educational facilities. Some community groups may move in and out of a state of being hard-to-reach as their social circumstances change. The Hard-to-reach Focus Group explored the concept of being hard-to-reach in the context of citizenship education.

Christoph Müller-Hofstede, initiator and organizer of the NECE conference talks about what is special about the year 2014, why citizenship educators are urged to talk about conflicts and what he is most excited about in the programme of the coming days.

Petra Grüne, NECE initiator, about what has changed over the last 10 years, why it is both a good and a bad thing that there are more than 40 nationalities involved in the conference this year and why we should talk about our crises, instead of trying to brush them aside.