Address: Çukurköy District Gürpınar Street Nu:1 Tavşanlı / Kütahya

Country: Turkey

 School website

Project: Digital Citizenship Education School

 

Working language during the project:

  • Turkish
  • English
     

Themes of the Council of Europe project “FREE to SPEAK, SAFE to LEARN - Democratic Schools for All” covered:

  • Making children’s and students’ voices heard
  • Preventing violence and bullying
  • Improving well-being at school
     

Competences from the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) addressed and where / how they were integrated:

  • Responsibility
    Students become aware of their own potential to participate actively in their society and make their voices heard on issues that they find important.
  • Co-operation skills
    Building a team, working together, sharing tasks, being responsible for certain issues, supporting others.
  • Knowledge and critical understanding of language and communication
    Using the Web 2.0 tools and organise a set of collaborative activities in which all the participating schools work together. Learning about the culture of different countries using Web 2.0 Tools with joy and respect.
     

Target group age range:

  • 5 - 11
  • 11 - 15
     

Level of education:

  • Primary education
  • Lower secondary education
  • Upper secondary education

Short description of the project:

Our centre is in Tavşanlı/Kütahya in the west of Turkey. We identify students’ abilities and needs (age range from 7 to 18) and make individualised educational programmes for them to support their educational, cultural and social needs. Our target population is people with special needs, their parents and also teachers. Our education mode differs from formal education. While elementary school students attempt to obtain grades to pass or prepare for exams, the organizational structure of our centre does not include objectives such as getting good grades, passing a class etc. Instead, education is carried out using a project-based model and students are expected to complete projects with required qualities.

As we are the DCE Pilot Project School, we created a Digital Citizenship Project Coordination Team including parents, students and teachers. We had a meeting with the coordination team and talked on the themes and carried out surveys. According to the survey results we decided to make projects about “Learning and Creativity”, “Media and Information Literacy”, “Active Participation”.

For the theme “Learning and Creativity” we conducted an international project called “Learn with web 2.0 Tools” to develop and express different forms of creativity, with different tools, in different contexts. The idea of the project is to use the Web 2.0 tools and organise a set of collaborative activities in which all the participating schools work i together. We let students make friends and learn about different countries’ cultures using Web 2.0 Tools with ease and respect. We also made a cardboard challenge in our centre to foster creativity.

For “Media and Information Literacy” we carried out the “OkuyaBİLSEM” project. This entailed reading stories on the streets of the town via mobile phones’ barcode readers. We hung qr codes on some places in the city centre.

For “Active Participation” we organised a “Thinkathon” in our centre. Our participants voice were heard. All outcomes, thoughts and opinions shared.

On the 5 February 2020 our centre celebrated international “Safer Internet Day”, where we talked about cyberbullying to raise awareness.
 

Aims/objectives

  • to teach them how to reflect upon different issues and with regard to their own decision-making on topics and obstacles they will encounter.
  • to increase their tolerance of multicultural lifestyles
  • to prepare them to become active, participative and responsible individuals
     

Expected results/outcomes

Ability to be critical of information presented by the media and social media, whatever they are.
 

Changes

The projects are organised includes a lot of flexibility. Due to the pandemic, our projects continued online.
 

Challenges you faced

Due to the pandemic we had difficulty attracting the attention of parents and students.
 

Time-frame of the project:

1 year
 

Council of Europe materials on citizenship and human rights education used while preparing or implementing your practice:

  • Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture
  • Democratic governance of schools
  • Publication: Digital Citizenship Education (DCE) 10 domains