European Summer School 2020
Our first digital European Summer School
In response to the COVID-19-Pandemic, the 2020 European Summer School took place as a purely digital event: 17 Peer Educators from 10 different countries came together in the digital sphere. The program included several trainings on (digital) educational approaches and didactic methods. In addition, our 2020 Fellows introduced their new workshops on represention in the media, fake news and hate speech. External experts discussed the topics of “educational inequalities in schools” and “decolonizing Europe”, and offered a diversity training for all participants.
Participants of the 2020 digital European Summer School.
1. Educational approach & didactic methods
What do we actually mean when we talk about Peer Education or Democratic Citizenship Education? How can we make youth education participatory? How can we ensure that our educational formats are inclusive and diversity-sensitive? These were the central questions discussed in order to build a common understanding of how we want to work with young people.
2. Digital EU-Crash-Course
In light of the COVID-19-Pandemic, a group of Trainers and Coordinators set up a Working Group on the digitalization of our EU-Crash-Course. Three members of the Working Group then presented this new digital format during the European Summer School in September and enabled the participants to incorporate it into their educational work throughout Europe.
3. Introduction of new media workshops
Our 2020 SPIEGEL Fellows, Maja, Clara and Julia, presented new workshop formats that they had been developing during their Fellowship. They openly discussed their workshops on “Fake News & Hate Speech” and “Representation in Media” with the Peer Educators and together elaborated on how they can be implemented and adapted to different countries and local circumstances.
4. Digital training methods
In addition to the EU-Crash-Course, Trainings for Trainers (T4Ts) have also been delivered digitally in many countries since 2020. But how can space for engagement and interaction be created in digital formats? Romy Solomon explored this question in her course and showed that it is in fact possible – we have since continued to offer digital T4Ts to replace and complement analogue trainings.
5. Educational inequalities in schools
In an Instagram Live, Aylin Karabulut and Evin Demir comparatively discussed educational inequalities in schools throughout Europe. They also analyzed the role of informal education in combating these inequalities. You can watch the talk here.
6. Decolonizing Europe
What role does Europe’s colonial past play in today’s post-migrant Europe? And how does it influence (non-)inclusive narratives on what it means to be European? These and other questions were addressed by Prof. Dr. El-Tayeb in a digital lecture and then followed by an interactive discussion moderated by Nozizwe Dube.
7. Diversity Training
In an additional training, led by Zorica Trikic from ISSA, the peer educators dealt with their own and societal prejudices and with fundamental power relations. They reflected on their own privileges and discussed the consequences for their own actions in the network Understanding Europe.