Introduction to the 2020-21 school project:“The Youth’s EU: From Knowledge to Civic Engagement”

We are proud of presenting the first tangible outcome by the students of four classes engaged in a new multilingual civic education project by the high school “G. Pascoli” of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. The project was first launched in 2019, as a collaboration between the Association “Elisabetta Paolucci” and the high school “G. Pascoli” to commemorate and carry on the legacy of one of the school’s teachers who had passed away suddenly in 2018. During her career as a teacher, Elisabetta Paolucci had been very active in the educational field through the promotion of social and cultural activities with a strong multi-cultural, multilingual and European outlook. Both the association dedicated to her memory and the school converged on launching this joint project, which has been called “La Strada Per L’Europa” (The Way To Europe), as it entails a voyage, of knowledge, but also in person, through the EU’s history, institutions and policies, with a focus on engaging students to advance their own reflections about EU policies and how European citizens’ lives could be concretely improved through participation and civic responsibility. The first edition of the project involved the formation of multilingual teams in collaboration with the Sozialwissenschaftliches Gymnasium – Fachoberschule für Tourismus “R. Gasteiner”, the participation of EU practitioners interacting with the students in English, German and Italian, and a final academic excursion to Brussels and Strasbourg with visits and meetings at the institutions’ headquarters in the spring of 2019.
The good quality of the students’ proposals in 2019 suggested to try and collect the following academic year’s class work in a more structured way, which has produced an e-book, readable here.
The process which led to it began in the fall of 2020, when students were introduced to the EU’s policies, divided into teams and given the possibility of choosing the policy on which to focus their group research from, among those that they felt were of more immediate and concrete relevance to the future of the EU. Most of the students chose environmental policies, showing how much the issue of the future of the planet is a concern for the younger generations, but also youth programs that favor mobility and multiculturalism, gender issues and organized crime. The elaboration of the research, guided by faculty through a series of group meetings and draft submissions, followed a common structure: identification of the problem, analysis of current EU policies, and own recommendations to the EU’s policy makers.
The efforts by the 57 students are worth reading, to see what European youngsters are most concerned about, what they care for and what they ask of the EU. In the discussion which followed the conclusion of the research work and the submission of their final drafts, students had the opportunity to exchange opinions with EU practitioners, who were invited to spend two days at the school in May 2021. The main request by the students to EU decision makers was: “You have the responsibility, so you should act, now, to protect the environment and hand over a decent world to us, where the rights to diversity, inclusion and health are protected and everybody can thrive fearlessly and freely”.
We would like to thank all the wonderful people that have dedicated their time and effort to this project, and will hopefully support it in the future. From Prof. Valentina Mignolli, who launched the initiative in 2018/19, to then principal Dr. Mirca Passarella, who embraced and sponsored it, to all the involved English teachers, among whom this year’s coordinator Prof. Dagmar Lenzen, as well as all other colleagues and the administrative and technical staff of the Liceo “G. Pascoli” as well as members of the Associazione Elisabetta Paolucci and the EU practitioners Silvio Gonzato and Alexandre Stutzmann. Through this initiative, the memory of Elisabetta is passed on in the best possible way, embracing her values and aspirations by her school, seen as a place of knowledge, growth and personal engagement for all.