Citizenship Education

Educating in values

Education for Global Citizenship is a dynamic and participatory process designed to sensitize and raise awareness in civil society about the values of justice, equity, and solidarity.

What are the objectives?

1. Train people to fight stereotypes and prejudices related to other peoples and cultures;
2. Train people for critical understanding and participation in local and international development;
3. Train public and private cooperators and agents of cooperation;
4. Contribute to the critical analysis of cooperation and its permanent updating;
5. Promote participative democracy and a culture of solidarity;
6. Obtain social support to give credibility to cooperation policies and actions.

What forms of intervention?

The educational processes triggered and carried out within the framework of Education for Citizenship actions may fall within different forms of intervention which, although they are often complementary, are characterised by variations in relation to the duration of the actions, the specific publics or the methodologies applied. Some of these forms of intervention are the following:

1. Awareness-raising: alerting to problems and situations, causes and fair, equitable and solidary alternatives, raising questions, reflections and the will to know, learn more and act coherently;
2. Pedagogical intervention: promote the learning of the critical reading of local and global inequalities, in a context of interdependence and identification of their causes, and the mobilisation for the commitment to transform these realities;
3. Political influence: provide arguments to people or institutions with power to take significant decisions, so that they respect publicly assumed commitments and may change current policies or inflect measures under preparation.

Which sectors of intervention?

1. Formal Education: education regulated in legislative form (pre-school education, primary education, secondary education, post-secondary non-higher education, and higher education).
2. Non-Formal Education: education not regulated in a legislative way, but structured by objectives and contents (Associations, Foundations, NGDOs, Companies and Trade Unions).
3. Informal Education: education not regulated in a legislative way and not structured by objectives and contents – Civil Society activities (demonstrations, strikes, among others).

What are the areas of intervention?

The National Strategy for Citizenship Education (Working Group for Citizenship Education, 2017) focuses on the exercise of active and responsible citizenship taking into account the following priority areas: Environmental Education; Consumer Education; Financial Education; Intercultural Education; Education for Security, Defense and Peace; Education for Gender Equality; Education for Risk; Education for Development; Education for Entrepreneurship; Education for Volunteering; Education for Human Rights; Media Education; Road Safety Education and Education for Health and Sexuality. In this sense, these priority areas, along with Education for Intergenerational Communication, are the focus of Solsef’s intervention strategy through its Office of Education for Citizenship and Inclusion – GECI

What is Solsef´s work in Citizenship Education?

Solsef develops awareness-raising activities aimed at changing the social paradigm in order to invest in fair and inclusive societies, either by changing attitudes in exclusionary societies or by raising awareness in excluded groups that must reclaim their role and place in society.

Solsef develops Education for Citizenship actions in “project” format (actions that transform previously identified needs into objectives to be achieved and results to be expected in a medium or long term period) and also through its “short awareness actions” (concrete actions, carried out in a short term, that aim to raise awareness of the target audience through lectures, conferences, exhibitions, group formation, awareness campaigns, contests, solidarity store events, sports events, street awareness actions, etc.

We count on a large network of volunteers, previously trained, who act as Agents of Education for Citizenship and help spread our goal of solidarity to the world.