Valdone Verseckiene teaches in Lithuania, at Laurynas Ivinskis Gymnasium in Kursenai. In this article she explains how she integrated active citizenship into teaching and how some follow-up activities involving local community strengthened it.
Laurynas Ivinskis Gymnasium (Kursenai, Lithuania) is a UNESCO school. It is very active in international project work and has a lot of friends and project partners in many countries around the world, mainly in Europe. Over years, numerous international projects have taken place, many foreign partners have visited our school, a lot of students and teachers have developed long-lasting personal international friendships after the projects ended.
When we meet our former students and talk to them about their school years, most of them remember the project activities they used to take part in and value them as an informal school of active citizenship they have gone through. As teachers, we are most happy about the fact they have learnt the main lesson we wanted them to learn: “It is only when you know how to be a citizen of your own region and country that you learn to be a citizen of the world.”(Terry Waite).
Kursenai is a small town in the north-west of Lithuania. After our students finish school, they leave for bigger towns and cities to study at universities, but they still feel part of the local community as they develop and participate in different local and regional projects. For example, a group of our former students who left school seven years ago and now live in other places of Lithuania and abroad in 2003 created a website for their native town (www.kursenai.lt). Since then, the website has grown and has become a virtual meeting place for both present and former inhabitants of Kursenai who are active members of the local community.
Latest news and information about different local activities is published here and discussions on issues important to the local community are going on. New members have joined the group of initiators of the website. They have been trained to manage different sections of the website, to initiate and moderate discussions, etc. It is good to see our former and present students working together as a group which has been joined by students from other schools of the town.
Every year during summer holidays, it is also pleasant to read advertisements inviting inhabitants of Kursenai to attend events organized by our former and present students. We know they are going to present the results of one more summer camp or one more project. We, teachers, know how much time, effort and hard work has been put into developing the idea, writing the project, finding sponsors, gathering the team and bringing the idea to life. This involves numerous e-mails that travel between Lithuania, the USA, the UK, Norway, Spain, Germany and other countries where live and study our former students who feel themselves part of the local community and who have chosen active citizenship as their way of life.
The examples mentioned above and many more show young people of our town the way to learn active citizenship – to believe we can make the difference and to do that, here and now.
