Description
Hungarian public education prepares just a few youngsters for the active citizenship thus youth who finish school have no experience in public life such as elections and public speeches. The main objective of the project is to make schools see pupils’ forums as educational tools. Development programs of the project will help students to learn about conflict management and rulemaking processes. Participants can learn about the active participation, decision-making processes; they will also have experience in elections and public speeches. The project promoter aims to increase the number of committed institutions, pedagogies, communities and networks thus to collaborate to the democratization of Hungarian society. Sensitizing trainings for pedagogies and pupils’ forums will be organized. An informational system will be elaborated. Project promoter will monitor the participating schools where open programs will be organized. Several publications and a project summary publication will be edited. An open evaluation conference will close the project. The target group includes educational institutions, pedagogies, youth workers and relevant experts.
Summary of project results
The aim of the project was to draw attention on the fact that making the pupils’ participation and school democracy should become the equipment of teaching. The project idea was to contribute to learn about democracy, active citizenship and in preventing conflicts through getting know the process of setting up rules. 5 primary and secondary schools were involved to the projects: in the selection process project promoter decided to involve both primary and secondary schools, in which were no similar pupils’ participatory forum, have different kinds of maintainers, from each region and had a motivation to participate in the project. Sensitizing trainings followed the selection procedure where teacher and pupils participated. Teachers were introduced to several models so they could choose. It was common that schools chose to improve the basic model and refrained from the innovations. Two kinds of questionnaires were prepared by the project promoter and filled by 81 pupils and 5 school directors. Professionals of the Foundation analyzed the questionnaires, online platforms of the schools and based on that the schools were offered several development instructions. Following those instructions pupils participation became more visible as they wrote and publicized short reports of school programs, made photos for the galleries, became more active and conscious in the life of the Pupil’s Self-government. Mentors supported the whole development processes. With the contribution of this project a network was established, and the next 5 schools were already selected and invited to the network; representatives of the Pupil’s Self-government -belonging to the new members- also visited the already participated schools. Each school organized a closing day, then the project promoter organized an evaluating conference where the closing, summarizing study was presented
Summary of bilateral results