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With the project ETHIKA: Ethics and values education in schools and kindergartens we have developed and provides a comprehensive support to school and kindergarten teachers in relation to ethics and values education. Among the main aims of ethics and values education are to stimulate ethical reflection, awareness, autonomy, responsibility, and compassion in children, to provide children with insight into important ethical principles and values, equip them with intellectual and moral capacities for responsible moral judgment, to build a school environment as an ethical community, and to reflectively situate an individual into local and global communities. 9 partner organizations from 6 EU countries have worked together on the project that had complementary skills and represented diverse types of organizations (universities, schools/kindergartens, research institutes, NGOs). The partnership was based on previous projects, bilateral cooperation, expertise and commitment to the strategic partnership with development strategies, aims, and visions related to ethics education.In order to address the challenge of teachers often not being equipped and prepared to address ethics and values education, we have structured project activities around 4 main outputs. After a comprehensive user needs analysis that included in-depth focus groups we developed a Manual for teachers and educators presenting 13 methodological approaches to ethics and values education including practical examples and useful tips. The manual also contains a description of basic approaches in ethics education and key insights into the moral development of children. It represents a useful tool to be used in classrooms as well as for teacher/educator training. The second outputs are Educational materials and tools for ethics and values education. These are prepared according to the age levels of students (3-5, 5-7, 7-9, 9-11 and 11-14 years) and six key themes identified as the most relevant (justice, respect, responsibility, self-esteem, conflict resolution, ethical actions). They can be adapted given the specific aims of a teacher and the context. The third output is a Curriculum proposal for ethics and values education for teachers and educators. It is aimed both to developers and implementers of ethics and values education training as well as a self-study guide. It includes descriptions of various approaches to ethics and values education and an overview of the existing models. The 3 curriculum pillars that we have identified as key are Philosophy with children and critical thinking, Ethics and values education: methods and tools, and Ethical aspects and challenges of the contemporary world (and how to address them in the classroom). The fourth output is the Policy paper on ethics and values education in EU that provides comprehensive support to policy- and decision-makers for the domain of education (both at the EU level as well as on the level of member states) regarding various dimensions of ethics education. The paper addresses the importance and aims of ethics education, the state of the art, main challenges, and puts forward effective, needs-based and sustainable cluster of policy recommendations. In addition to the outputs, we carried out 3 comprehensive training activities. Within the project, we have reached more than 250 teachers with our training/learning activities, while the number of teachers reached with our educational materials exceeded 1700. The number of schools, institutions, and networks of organizations of teachers and educators that was be involved within the project lifetime was 591 and out of these 33 are now members of a network for ethics and values education. The number of general public reached by the media as part of raising the awareness was over 3 million. We contacted 3323 policy-/decision-makers. We have also produced 18 expert articles. We have provided teachers and educators with new opportunities for learning about ethics education and also made a push towards more systemic change to include these topics and approaches into their initial education. As part of the impact and sustainability activities, we have managed to secure follow-up projects. One of these (Little - Learn Together to Live Together) will use the outputs developed and transform them into online courses for teachers in 4 languages and will encompass a wide network of schools. The other will address the ethics educations as part of sports education. In future, we aim to build further synergy, reinforce cooperation, and exchange good practices between different players in the field of ethical education and peer-to-peer and experts support. That is why we have established a European network for ethics and value educations that will be led by the University of Ljubljana. With this, we will enhance innovation and internationalization in the school sector and strengthen cooperation and capacity building in the field of ethics and values education.
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