Ask an avarage European teenage boy what he likes better: learning history or the world of football. The answer is likely to be the latter. But don't we need young Europeans to understand the history of Europe in order to build a better common future? Yes, but let's use the history of football to do it! We, European history teachers, football historians and clubs, will make the tools for the pupils to see key moments and processes that shaped the Europe we live in though the lens of football.
Different city's throughout Europe
The project seems to address social exclusion through inclusive history education. History education has a transformational character on young people’s identity and sense of citizenship, but with a large majority of pupils in Europe learning history at the vocational level, history teachers struggle to develop these students’ historical consciousness and competencies. The challenge is how to raise this target group access to high quality history education. Football history may be the solution.
We aim for a freely available online educational resource on the history of football, including transnational source collections, engaging learning activities and historical content that illuminate how football offers us a people’s history of Europe. This resource will be ready and widely used in time for the European Championship of 2020 to show to a large public that common European history education is possible.
A European working group of history educators, historians and civil society active in football, will first create the pedagogical framework on how football history can be used in history education in all European national education systems.
Then, with local football clubs, and schools, this group will run a series of pilot workshops where football clubs will host local schools and their students to use the European framework to research the history of their club and find new ways to learn about local history in a European framework.
With the pilot workshop results, the working group will work with history teachers associations and football federations to collaboratively design, test, validate and implement the online educational resource in a range of conferences and teacher training event
Vocational level students to be enthused by local football history to achieve historical competences, and historical consciousness.
European History teachers to work together to develop tools and approaches for their students.
Football clubs to expand their anti-racism agenda with schools locally, and in Europe.
History teachers associations that lack societal partners on the local and national level.
Football history researchers whose research is not seen beyond the academic level.
This project is the first to connect history education and football on a European scale. The educational resources produced will be used across Europe in the formal system. The project involves history teachers associations as key multipliers of local activities and brokers or European agenda’s to the national level. Partnerships with football will generate high visibility and impact, supporting UEFA’s recent acknowledgement that education has a more prominent role to play in combatting racism.
Meeting of the European Working group: 5000 EUR
Pilot workshops in Amsterdam, Madrid, Frankfurt and Istanbul: 12000EUR (About 3000EUR per city)
Advocacy meetings with football clubs, national federations and UEFA: 10000EUR
Project management: 15000EUR