Education for Citizenship as a Permanent Laboratory

In this chapter, the authors discuss the results of three focus group discussions conducted in the context of the teacher professional development project STEP, (School Territory Environment Pedagogy), undertaken by researchers and teachers from three EU Countries - France, Spain, Italy - and one non-EU country, Switzerland. Specifically, we present findings regarding changes in how the teachers in the Milano Bicocca case study represented citizenship education practices. The focus group data were subjected to content analysis, using a set of categories drawn from the national reference documents on curriculum design and the transnational curriculum defined in the STEP project. The changes in the teachers’ representations concerned three main aspects: dialogue with the local community and territorial context; the gap between teachers declared intentions and actual educational actions; the adoption of a complex perspective in the choice of knowledge to be mobilized.