New paths of active and aware citizenship in the schools of the Municipality of Cento thanks to the URBACT - Active Citizens project
Edited on
05 September 2022Thanks to the ideas and proposals that emerged from the URBACT project, the Municipality of Cento has launched a series of educational activities within the local schools of all levels. The goal was to co-design with the schools meetings and workshops, held by civil servants, which would help students to become aware of their role as young citizens able to actively participate in the life of their community. Different levels of student involvement have been put into place, from the exploration of places of identity and aggregation, to the understanding that active participation cannot be aside from a full awareness of what is happening in one's own territory and from one’s ability in critically acquiring information through the available channels.
For example, in 14 classrooms of a primary school, a workshop was set up to introduce students to the history of the school building currently in use, built at the end of the 19th century, that they will leave in June 2022 to move to a new one. In fact, one begins to be active and aware citizens when one perceives the sense of belonging to a community, also through the knowledge of its most significant and socially relevant places. The meetings and related activities, in addition to a purely historical aspect, have also partly brought out the anthropological dimension of the school as an institution, thanks to the study of the old class registers and the teachers’ reports and thanks also to the help of old school materials (nibs, old spelling books...). A photographic and documentary exhibition was also held in the new school complex.
Another activity addressed to 8 middle school classes wanted to deepen the theme of aware information through the municipal web site. The aim was to bring young citizens closer to this means of communication which "tells" what is happening in the area: the facilities provided, the structure of the municipal machine and the decisions taken by the governing bodies.
After an introductory and informative moment, the students were involved in a game , a kind of a treasure hunt, to interactively explore the contents of the Net: the classes divided into teams had to answer an exciting quiz game by means of Kahoot tool , whose questions were hidden among the pages of the Municipality website. In this way, while they were having fun, the students had to learn to orient themselves in the net.
Three other middle school classes have joined another proposal aimed at bringing young citizens closer to local authorities by creating a chance to familiarise with the decision-makers and encouraging to engage in dialogue with them.
The final objective of the proposal was the conduction of an interview with some key political and institutional figures: Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Councilors, President and members of the City Council, Municipal General Secretary, Head of the Local Police, President of the International Cultural Centre Guercino and members of the Neighborhood Councils.
A preparatory meeting was held in each classroom during which the students were introduced to the roles and functions of the municipal institutional figures.
During the meetings, the students were divided into groups and encouraged to think and formulate possible questions to be addressed to their future interlocutors. A discussion in class with the teachers in the following days completed the preparatory session.
Some days after, interviews were conducted in the institutional places and a video of the interviews was made. Students had the chance to informally meet the local authorities and experience their complete availability to talk to them, to listen to them, to spend time with them and share the same emotion and sometimes embarrassment to be in front of a camera. And laughing together at the bloopers created an even more informal atmosphere of conversation.
The final step of the action was the video projection at school with the Vice Mayor and the Councilor in charge of Culture attending and thus continuing in class the friendly dialogue and debate with the students.
The video can be in future a useful means for the other students of the school to learn something more about Cento’s municipal authorities.
Finally, 7 classes of a high school were involved in interactive meetings to bring out their perception of the activities of the Municipality, in particular those aimed at young people. In a first meeting, the girls and the boys, divided into teams, challenged each other in the search for correct information on procedures concerning their being citizens, on the reliability of the sources and on the meaning of some terms related to the concept of citizenship.
In the second meeting, two political representatives, members of the City Council or of the Mayor’s staff, explained to the students the reasons that led them to run for administrative elections, what their role entails and what are the values and principles on which their institutional role is based
The goal was to provide young people, who are about to come of age, with some tools to avoid remaining passive citizens, but to gain awareness of the opportunities offered by their public body, acquiring new responsibilities also as citizens.
Thanks to the inputs produced by the Active Citizens project, the Municipality of Cento has therefore opened an important dialogue with the young citizens of Cento with meetings dedicated to active citizenship issue, destined from now on to become a fixed appointment in the schools of the municipal area.
Submitted by Nicolas Castet on