Teacher education: Europe comes to the classroom

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Engaging with the future of Europe is more important than ever. Wars and crises are presenting the countries of Europe with challenges that can only be solved together.

Yet Europe’s most important institution, the European Union, can seem remote from everyday life. It is seen as bureaucratic, undemocratic, and over-regulated, and Euroscepticism is widespread even among the young.

This makes it all the more important to get school students interested in Europe. However, the EU is difficult to teach in schools, explains Professor Markus Gloe in the “EU goes School” podcast. The European treaties, the institutions, the accession of member states can make for very dry material. And rote memorization of facts is hardly going to engage young people. What is needed are lessons about Europe that are livelier and closer to students’ everyday experiences – lessons that show that the EU is far more than a mere administrative apparatus.

Engaging lessons

Gloe heads “EU goes School – Teachers as EU Ambassadors (EGS-LAB),” a project run by the Munich Center for Teacher Education (MZL) and the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at LMU. Funded by the European Commission since 2022, the project aims to inspire prospective and experienced teachers to be interested in European education. It gets them to work together to develop appealing lesson units, with the support of subject-specific teaching experts at LMU. The concepts they develop are then tested and evaluated in schools, while the Munich Center for Teacher Education publishes particularly successful lesson units on the project website.

The website also features a digital learning platform where users can explore the history, institutions, and decision-making processes of the EU through texts, audio, and video materials. This is a good deal more engaging than reading a textbook – and allows users to learn individually at their own pace.

Train the trainer

To strengthen European education in schools over the long term and build a network of EU ambassadors, “EU goes School” offers teacher training courses and a certificate program. Its “train the trainer” principle encourages participants to pass on their knowledge to colleagues and take on a multiplier role at their schools.

The project also offers multi-day field trips to Strasbourg and Brussels, where student teachers and trainee teachers learn how European institutions work and how decisions are made. Lilly Schmidt, who is studying to become a high-school teacher of German and politics, took part in a field trip in January. “The European Union often gets short shrift in teacher education,” she says. In Brussels, she had the opportunity to speak with MEPs about parliamentary procedures. She was particularly enthusiastic about the simulation game, in which participants developed different positions on climate and consumer protection issues, built majorities, and negotiated compromises.

Quite complex

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Her conclusion: “The EU’s decision-making processes are even more complex than you might think.” The reason, as Markus Gloe explains in the “EU goes School” podcast, is that the European Union is neither a classic confederation of states nor a federal state. Decisions emerge from the interplay between institutions and member states, which often represent different interests. The decision-making channels are correspondingly complicated.

The podcast is a new endeavor in the project’s second funding phase. Every month, guests from academia and practice discuss the EU and how it can be taught in the classroom – an accessible way to reach people beyond seminars and training courses.

An end to cable clutter

Project team member Fabian Heindl hosts the podcast. He explains that Europe is most interesting to young people when politics affects them directly. And that happens far more often than many people realize. After all, EU law is responsible not only for the notorious bendy cucumber rules, but also for the recently introduced standardization of charging cables, which has significantly reduced cable clutter at home. Europe has long been part of everyday life.

Heindl points out, however, that the project is not about approaching the EU uncritically or without reflection. Democracy, after all, depends on criticism as well. What school students should learn from their teachers is to question European decisions, weigh up positions, and develop their own proposals – civic agency and political judgment rather than rote memorization.

“Simulation games can have a huge impact”

Participant Lilly Schmidt hopes that as many student teachers as possible will have the opportunity to experience the work of the EU on site. “Student teachers often have no idea how much potential the EU offers as a topic in schools. Many shy away from teaching it, know too little about it, and fail to recognize its relevance.” The field trip to Brussels showed her how much can be learned through direct experience. “Textbooks do not offer nearly as much,” she says. Learning is often reduced to theoretical knowledge. “But a simulation game, for example, can have a huge impact because it makes complex decision-making processes within the EU tangible.”

She already knows that when she qualifies as a teacher, she wants to offer her classes more than the usual facts about European treaties and institutions. Students should understand just how much European decisions affect their lives.
Because, as Lilly Schmidt says: “Many young people have no idea how much the EU does for them.”

For the website, see: EU goes School – Teachers as EU-Ambassadors

For the podacst, see: Podcast: EU goes School