Established in 1994, the Center for Citizenship Education (the CCE) is a non-governmental educational foundation. The CCE promotes civic knowledge, practical skills and attitudes necessary in the building of a democratic state founded on the rule of law and civil society.
In our opinion civic education can be provided on three levels of school:
What this comes down to in practice can be illustrated with three of our most successful projects in Poland and with two recent international ones.
KOSS
Civic Education in Local Government Schools (KOSS) is the CCE’s oldest program. This program for junior high schools started in the early 1990’s, when the CCE decided to take an active part in the reforms then taking place in Polish schools. The primary objective of reform was to make civic education both effective and enjoyable for pupils.
Participation
The program KOSS prepares pupils for active participation in a democratic society by introducing pupils to the basic issues of democracy and civic engagement, the political and legal systems in Poland, and the basic rules governing the market economy. KOSS lessons are unlike regular school classes because they involve interactive games, discussions, and group work and projects. Many lesson activities involve using the Internet, the press and other sources of information. Apart from its educational and informative aspects, KOSS textbooks value pupil experiences and emphasize the importance of participation in daily life. This approach to education shows that learning can be fun, interesting and engaging, but it can also seem difficult to teachers because it requires active participation in the learning process and openness to new ideas.
KOSS has become the most common civic education program for junior high schools. The accompanying textbook is used by 350,000 pupils each year. In the first year of the educational reform, the CCE was awarded an honorary distinction for ‘Outstanding Service in Education’ for introducing KOSS into Polish schools.
Support
To support teachers in this new approach, the CCE has prepared detailed lesson plans and examples. The CCE firmly believes that the greatest reward for the effort required on the part of teachers is the satisfaction of seeing pupils develop as active citizens in society. This teacher support has now been continued in a brand new Internet course for Polish and American teachers of civic education. The textbook and curriculum guides provided by KOSS are accompanied by a wide range of information available to teachers and pupils through the Internet (www.ceo.org.pl/koss).
Youth Against Corruption
The CCE launched this program in January 2004 as part of a larger initiative to introduce education about corruption into the school curriculum in Poland. The CCE developed a curriculum plan and teacher trainings for teaching about corruption, about the threats associated with it, as well as about the means of fighting corruption.
Accessible
The objective of the program is to make information about the issue of corruption more widely accessible, to introduce methods of teaching about corruption, and to educate about public policy regarding corruption. The CCE advises on curriculum development, publishes relevant teaching materials, organizes teacher trainings, establishes working relationships with local government and educational authorities, and has developed an Internet-based support system for educators and pupils involved in school anti-corruption programs.
Over 3500 teachers has been trained and prepared to teach about corruption. Over 3000 students are involved in anticorruption projects.
Engaging
Directly involving pupils in special projects is particularly important because it encourages young people to become socially engaged in the fight against corruption. Through the project, pupils should deepen their knowledge about the threats of corruption, learn how to recognize situations that lead to corruption in everyday life, change their attitudes and level of tolerance for corruption in their own environment and overcome the sense of defeat and hopelessness about fighting corruption. We also provide a website about the program, which gives access to educational materials and relevant links, accounts of youth projects and serves as a forum for discussion and debate on corruption: www.ceo.org.pl/przeciwkorupcji.
Topics
The CCE lessons deal with topics such as the history, definitions and causes of corruption, corruption-generating factors and statistical data illustrating changes in corruption levels. Examples of corruption are given to prompt pupils to analyze and understand what constitutes corruption. Attention is given to negative effects of corruption for both the economy and society and how to behave when confronted with corruption. Pupils receive a training on how to organize an anti-corruption project, step-by-step: by exchanging ideas, strategizing about how to get projects started, planning a project from start to finish, and by implementing specific activities for their project.
Young People Vote
This program has been provided since 1995. Its aim is to give young people the opportunity to participate in the most important public event in a democratic country, democratic elections. As part of this program, students organize presidential and parliamentary elections in their schools as well as referenda and constitutional debates.
Voice
The central feature of every edition of this project is a nation-wide voting for young people (a parliamentary vote, national polls, a local authorities vote, a constitutional poll, a president vote). The main aim of the project is to give students an opportunity to voice their opinions on the voting issue in the period preceding the official national voting. Information has been provided for young people to allow them to make informed decisions and to assume the responsibility involved. Thus, they gain a sense of participation in developments of crucial importance to themselves and to Poland, and will encourage their parents to take part in the ‘grown-up’ voting, polls or referendum. The ultimate objective of the project is to conduct a nation-wide campaign to promote informed participation in every national voting case on the eve of the event.
In each edition there are over 800 schools (5000 students) participating in the Program. Over 5000 schools and 950,000 students have participated in the school referendum ‘European Union Young People Vote 2003’.
Information retrieval
The educational materials prepared under the project help pupils collect information concerning the issue (European integration, the constitution, the European Parliament and voting issues in general) on their own. If young people are encouraged to actively find answers to these questions, they do not make up their minds without reflection or relying exclusively on the opinions of others (their parents, their teachers, the media). Rather, they make responsible and adequately justified decisions. Young people want to share their opinions with adults from their community, including with their parents. The website of the program can be found at www.ceo.org.pl/mlodzi.
Civic Education in Ukraine
This program is implemented in cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Sports by a consortium that is led by Cambridge Education (Great Britain) and consists furthermore of the CCE (Poland), Deutsch-Russischer Austausch (Germany) and the Step by Step Foundation (Ukraine). It is funded under Tacis Program. Its aim is to reform civic education in schools. The components of the program are the following: curriculum development, teacher training, extra-curriculum activities, adaptation of materials for children with special needs and publication of textbooks. The CCE is responsible for short-term expertise in extra-curricular activities and teacher training. The project begun in March 2005 and ends in February 2008.
Teaching for Democracy
This is a research project conducted in South Africa, the United States, the Ukraine and Poland. Its aim is to measure to what extent extra-curricular activities implemented by young people increase their knowledge of democracy, influence their attitude and form key competencies. The research is based on the questionnaire already used in studies by the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) so it may also serve to make some comparative studies.
Sylwia Żmijewska, Center for Citizenship Education, Warsaw