Transformative Practices for Multiscale Citizenship Curricula: Revitalising Emancipatory Pedagogy in the European Education Area

This open access book provides a conceptual framework and a consistent series of meaningful didactic practices aimed at revitalizing critical citizenship pedagogy for democracy, beyond both methodological nationalism and cosmopolitanism. It discusses original theoretical insights into the field, highlights key structural contradictions in today's public education systems and offers operational descriptions of activities tailored to progressive developmental objectives. The book stems from ongoing research and action that has identified and is addressing the need for a more self-aware and reality-congruent citizenship education effort along the compulsory and post-compulsory school curriculum in Europe and beyond, cross-cutting any disciplinary field. This entails a paradigm shift toward what the authors call a "multiscale critical approach" to civic agency, culture and education, from the local to the global. The book contents foster an upscaled and widespread classroom experimentation in the motivating light of cooperatively developing a bottom-up contribution to a reference curriculum for citizenship education in the European Education Area. This book is intended for citizen-teachers of all disciplines and school levels, school directors, technical and vocational trainers, educational professionals including in the non-formal and informal education sectors, policy-makers and scholars who share our commitment to bring about system change in an emancipatory perspective. A perspective that is aimed at empowering what we call "emerging subjective autonomies" so as to maximise their ability to consciously and actively live their entangled condition.

Francesco Pigozzo is Associate Professor of French Literature at eCampus University, Italy, where he coordinates the bachelor and the master degree courses in European and World Languages, Cultures and Literatures. Francesco is a co-founder and director of the CITOYEN.NE.S Research Centre at eCampus University, where he develops an interdisciplinary research framework grounded on the cross-fertilisation of literary, epistemological and social-scientific studies. He co-designed and implemented numerous Jean Monnet/Erasmus+ projects focused on the parallel development of theoretical research in citizenship pedagogy and experimental training and didactic initiatives and materials with tens of thousand pupils/students and their teachers in different EU countries, most recently the JM Teacher Training project "Multiscale EU" (2022-2025). He also cooperatively developed the multilingual and freely accessible platform called "Virtual Learning Environment on Europeans' Unity".

Daniela Martinelli is an independent researcher in the field of citizenship pedagogy. She is also currently coordinating a radical pedagogical experimentation for lower secondary students in the framework of the outdoor homeschooling initiative called "Metamorfosi nel Mondo", near Florence, Italy. Martinelli is co-founder and director of the CITOYEN.NE.S Research Centre at eCampus University. She also co-designed and implemented numerous Jean Monnet/Erasmus+ projects focused on the parallel development of theoretical research in citizenship pedagogy and experimental training and didactic initiatives and materials with tens of thousand pupils/students and their teachers in different EU countries, most recently the JM Teacher Training project "Multiscale EU" (2022-2025). She cooperatively developed the multilingual and freely accessible platform called "Virtual Learning Environment on Europeans' Unity".