SOIF D'EUROPE

Based on the unfortunate observation of the lack of knowledge of Europe and its institutions by many audiences and the low involvement of institutions on this subject – particularly in education (see the report Teaching Europe in France by Thierry Chopin, published by the Jacques Delors Institute in October 2020) – the project was born from the need and the desire to improve knowledge of Europe among educational teams or audiences who expressed the need in all areas (geography, history, unity and diversity of territories and cultures, values ​​and contributions, challenges and objectives of institutional and civic construction) for their own culture and for the training of young people or adult applicants.

Several objectives were targeted. First of all, to ensure that Europe is better known in its functioning (institutions), values, contributions, cultural and linguistic diversity, assets and potential. In doing so, contribute to better training of teachers and trainers and their audiences to allow better knowledge and greater involvement of young people. Then, thanks to the possibilities of exchanges and observations in the field, the objective was to know and compare in several territories the dissemination of objective information on the European Union and its contributions as well as the feeling of belonging and local commitment to Europe. Observations, practices and experiences shared and compared could lead, when necessary, to a positive remediation of situations. In addition, training citizens by reaching the general public through dissemination actions, both around schools and through associative work, was another major objective to be achieved.

The first step was to connect the 10 partner structures (different in their type, size, operating methods and age of the learning audiences) from the 4 European regions concerned. The exchanges took place alternately remotely (emails, videoconferences) and in person: transnational steering meetings; virtual visits, exchange sessions and field visits by participants from each of the partner structures; local or transnational conferences and seminars for impact and dissemination open to the public. The study visits were conducted remotely and in person: virtual visits organized by the partners of each territory and resulting in audiovisual productions; field visits allowing participants a better understanding of the geographical, social, educational and cultural context of each partner as well as an observation and comparison of practices and, also, a collection of information and resources on site. To discover or better understand the European institutions, a visit to Brussels allowed us to meet their stakeholders (elected officials, technicians, etc.) and to exchange with them.

Virtual visits by videoconference and field study visits have allowed us to create an audiovisual and material corpus in digital format presenting the visits, each territory and its characteristics, each structure and its staff and learning audiences, a certain number of activities carried out likely to interest the partners and to feed the objectives of the project. This corpus is made available on the media created for the project: shared storage space, dedicated site and audiovisual channel (Youtube) each bearing the name of the Thirsting For Europe project. Several conferences and impact and dissemination seminars were offered (a transnational seminar and several local seminars) as well as numerous workshops and activities conducted with the learning audiences of each partner. The dedicated digital site was designed to bring together all the information, resources, productions and communication media collected by the partners and participants throughout the project. It is accessible to all audiences in order to allow a wide dissemination of this content. It also allows to discover, get to know each partner better and make contact with them.