Reviewing education and training for governance and active citizenship in Europe : a Central and Eastern European perspective : the implications of the research for Central and Eastern European policy design on active citizenship and governance

The RE-ETGACE Project, 'Reviewing Education and Training for Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe - A Central and Eastern European Perspective' is a complementary measure to the original ETGACE Project 'Education and Training for Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe'. The ETGAGE Project explored the nature of active citizenship and governance in six contrasting European countries (Belgium, Finland, Slovenia, Spain, the Netherlands, and UK), where as the RE-ETGACE project focused on two Central and Eastern European Countries: Hungary and Romania. It has investigated how people learn to be active citizens, which institutions should foster social activism and participation to governance; and what education interventions should be designed. As a newly understood concept, 'active citizenship' has proven hard to accommodate within research and theoretical traditions. In the context of the Re-ETGACE project, social activism has been seen as a product of learning. Social learning has been conceptualized as either the internalization of specific identity or the acquiring of skills and knowledge necessary for activism. Our data shows that other significant factors the family and specifically the paternal model, the relationship of projects to social mobility and, less often, collective identities - all contribute to the emergence of an activist's identity through the processes of identification or differentiation. However, the skills necessary for activism are learnt mainly in informal situations in schools, at the job or in other different learning contexts. Those skills learnt through various forms of lifelong learning and associative memberships are amongst the most important