LEVEL 2. EXPLORE BEST PRACTICE

Introduction

REM (December 2016 – December 2019) was an Erasmus+ KA3 project involving seven partners in Italy, Spain, Germany and Romania. It upscaled the Dozza Good Practice, developed with Muslim inmates in a Bologna prison, into a transferable methodology connecting European constitutional principles with the Arabic-Islamic heritage of participants. Pilot trainings reached around 167 people in prisons, reception centres and adult schools, and a Training of Trainers phase extended it to professionals.

The Challenge

What social issue does it address?

The civic exclusion of Muslim immigrants in Europe, where migration status, religious identity, age, gender and educational attainment intersect. Foreign residents hold lower qualifications than native populations, civic literacy is hard to access, and no didactic materials connect democratic constitutional frameworks with Islamic cultural and linguistic heritage, leaving newcomers marginalised from democratic life.

Why is it important?

Civic exclusion and cultural misrecognition are among the conditions that generate vulnerability to polarisation and extremist recruitment. Addressing them through education acts on the causes rather than the symptoms, and does so in the settings where the most isolated populations already are.

How does it contribute to the BRIDGE Challenge?

It addresses Level A Challenge 1 by acting on the point where legal status, ethno-religious identity, age and gender converge to produce trajectories of exclusion, and by supplying the pedagogical infrastructure that makes constitutional values accessible to those populations.

How does it work?

Four phases over 36 months: contextual analysis and methodological design; pilot trainings adapted by each partner to its own setting; a Training of Trainers cycle in every country; and consolidation into a multilingual E-booklet. Didactics for classes with differentiated skills, cooperative learning and autobiographical narration are combined, with Islamologists, legal experts and cultural mediators involved.

What might inspire you?

Ideas for adaptation

1. Use the constitution as a text to discuss, not a set of rules to memorise.
2. Start from what learners already believe and find the bridges to democratic principles.
3. Let learners tell their migration story: abstract rights become concrete through it.
4. Design lessons for groups where language level and prior schooling differ widely.
5. Bring in a cultural mediator when the content touches religious identity.
6. Teach civic education where people already are: prisons, reception centres, adult schools.
7. Train the trainers, so that the practice survives without its original team.
8. Produce bilingual materials: a right understood in one language only is half understood.
9. Turn assessment into a collective activity instead of an individual test.
10. Scale up a practice that already works rather than inventing a new one.

Resources created