Interactions within classrooms contribute to adolescents' democratic civic development by providing resources fostering students' political understanding. Many teachers participate in social or political groups in their communities and more broadly. These out-of-school experiences inform their classroom practices and are contextualized by national…

Purpose: To analyse prospective teachers' interest in global citizenship education (GCE) and the inclusion of GCE-related issues in a teaching programme in Italy. Design/methodology/approach: Administration of an online questionnaire to preservice teachers attending a course for becoming pre-primary and primary school teachers, and discussion of…

While global citizenship education (GCE) is becoming increasingly popular, it is also a complex and ambiguous concept that assumes different meanings. This article explores the dominant discourses that construct GCE in terms of the qualification, socialization and subjectification functions of education. Based on a qualitative study that used…

Civic education has always been an ancillary subject in the Italian school system. Introduced at the end of the 1950s as a sort of appendage to the history programs, it has recently been subject to multiple reforms although little or nothing has changed in reality. The analysis of a sample of civic education textbooks in use in schools explains…

The implementation of global citizenship education (GCE) represents a challenge for the school system in Italy in terms of curriculum planning, teaching methods and contents. After a thorough overview of the Italian educational scenario on GCE, this article aims to present a learning unit on GCE related issues implemented in an Italian 8th-grade…

The thesis of this article is that in the informational society, social and intercultural education must be hybridized with media education. From this strong incorporation of media in education comes an approach to citizenship education as a new field of action in media education. The case study analysed deals with the flow of refugees into Italy…

Since its inception in 2004, Siena Italian Studies (SIS) has worked to offer students a challenging and engaging intercultural experience thanks to the implementation of the service-learning pedagogy and the practice of reflection combined with language acquisition. Over the years, SIS courses have been aligned with European policies and…

According to recommendations of the UN Secretary General's Global Education First Initiative, countries and regions require a number of structural changes if they are to implement educational policies and practice based on global citizenship education, and to promote respect and responsibility across cultures. In this paper, we present the first…

This paper presents the main findings of an action-research study that took place in seven European countries in order to develop effective educational responses to prevent and combat discrimination. The study entailed the design of media and citizenship education activities, their implementation in the different educational contexts and the…

This paper reports on a European project, the Comenius ECLIPSE project (European Citizenship Learning in a Programme for Secondary Education) developed by six European partners coordinated by the University of Trento in the years 2011-2014. ECLIPSE (co-financed by the EACEA--Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) aims at developing,…

This article describes an important document compiled by a group of Italian geographers who teach in the Teaching Sciences faculty. Twenty-two university professors in an online community debated concepts and compared ideas in order to establish content, methods and didactic approaches to be applied when training Primary School teachers (pupils…

In this paper some pathways of geographical analysis will be illustrated and discussed, seen from a didactic point of view. The geographical theme chosen is that of migration. Migratory phenomena and the problems associated with it have always been a classic theme of geography; today however, they are of a particular interest and will allow us to…

This publication aims to capture how policies and measures relating to citizenship education have evolved over recent years in European countries. It focuses on the following areas which are integral to the provision of citizenship education: (1) Curriculum aims, approaches and organisation; (2) Student and parent participation in school…

Recent work in science and technological studies has provided a clearer understanding of the way in which science functions in society and the interconnectedness among different strands of science, policy, economy and environment. It is well acknowledged that a different way of thinking is required in order to address problems facing the global…

The text for this article derives from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which contain the central elements of his extensive critique of education in Benito Mussolini's Italy. In prison from 1926 to 1937, he produced a remarkable amount of writing on many political and cultural subjects, all of which were scribbled out in student notebooks and…