When working with youth, there is much to be gained from developing their sense of community and stimulating active citizenship. Both are beneficial for character development and raising prosocial behaviour. Active citizenship within a community also helps to develop solidarity and promotes tolerance while building social cohesion constructs.

As a school or sports club, there are many ways in which these values can be incorporated within the curriculum. Not only with a focus on your school or sports club itself, but also to build a bridge between the institution and its social environment. This focus is especially valuable when a school or sports club has chosen community values as its core values.

So how do you incorporate these values? How can schools and sports clubs promote active citizenship?

For the sake of simplicity, we will use the words teacher and classroom in this article. These words can easily be replaced by the words mentor/coach/trainer, or social worker. Replace the word classroom with field, canteen or locker room, if applicable. The point is to adjust the given examples to your particular setting. If you struggle with these adjustments, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to us directly. We will be happy to help remove any barriers you may experience.

Why would you?

Before you start looking at the HOW and WHAT, start by defining your WHY. Why does your school (or do you) find this matter so important? What skills are required to become an active citizen and be part of a strong and positive community? How do your colleagues define the words community and active citizenship? Can you create a shared meaning? What does your team want to achieve amongst the students? Which goals do you have?

By defining your shared goals, you will be better able to decide which interventions and tools are needed. The added focus leads to higher efficiency and the ability to measure your progress.

The skills that an active citizen has mastered

While defining your WHY will give you a sense of direction, some teams will still struggle to answer the question: what do we need to teach or practice to create strong members for our communities?

Here are some possible learning outcomes you can focus on:

• Form a basic understanding of how cultures are formed, expressed and connected;
• Create an understanding of the connection between culture and personal identity;
• Generate awareness of and respect for the differences between cultures;
• Create an understanding of the communities surrounding the student and how these are connected;
• Create curiosity about how others express themselves and how students can express themselves;
• Teach students how to ask questions;
• Strengthen active listening skills;
• Create the ability to identify important stakeholders within a community;
• Enable students to analyse power structures within communities;
• Teach students to address and recognise social issues;
• Develop conflict management skills;
• Strengthen problem-solving skills;
• Provide students with the opportunity to plan social action;
• Grow their empathic skills

Learning in the classroom

The next question is how you will incorporate these subjects or skills into lessons taught. It is highly recommended to work together with the entire team so that students practise the skills and subjects in a variety of situations, at different locations and via different people. This will enable students to generalise their skills.

The definition is

Any approach starts with a dialogue. Ask your students what a community is. The point is to create shared meaning by using their own words. Stimulate a discussion in which your students deep dive into the subject. What makes a community a community? Which behaviours create and uphold social cohesion? Which communities do they know? How do they differ from each other? What would happen if we didn’t have any communities in the world? What would our world look like? You can make the discussion as broad or as focused as you’d like.

Connecting citizenship with your lessons

Depending on the subject you teach, connect the value or concept with your curriculum. If you teach art, for instance, you could invite one or more local artists to give a class to your students or show ways in which art supports or even strengthens your local communities. If you teach religion, you can let them analyse the religious background of a certain community. If you are a mentor or teach social studies, you can let students look for people in the community who contribute to it and have them write a report or hold a presentation about that person. Or you can ask students to write letters to a political figure to advocate for a specific issue that affects the local community. If you are a physics teacher, you can create exercises that require cooperation or group work and let the students reflect on the lessons learned, drawing parallels between the exercises and real life. If you teach a language, you can talk about ways language brings people together or discuss poems and books in which communities are an important part of the storyline. And if you teach music, give them a shared challenge (the cup challenge) or have them look for songs that are about community and caring for the people around us.

The possibilities are endless, and by bouncing ideas off your colleagues, you will find many more!

School-wide events

School-wide events are another great way to promote a sense of community and have a strong effect on prosocial behaviour. If active citizenship and community are important values to your school, incorporate several events per year. These can be focused on your school's community: cleaning up the school before summer recess together, cleaning the school grounds, inviting parents to lunch with their kids at school, rotating canteen cleaning shifts amongst the students, organising a fundraiser to support poor students with canteen cards, laptops, or any other needed materials, formulating the social contract within the school or classroom. It can be any activity that improves the school environment.

If you are looking for ways to connect your school with the local community, have students clean the side-walks and nature alongside the roads they travel most -or within the neighbourhood of the school-, donate a day of work to a local charity, have students visit the elderly in a nearby nursing home and play games, talk, walk or even read to them, help fix up a local playground, have students organise an event to raise goods, food or money for a local cause, let them help in a soup kitchen to serve and support the homeless or at a food bank for the less privileged.

The most important element of organising events is active learning, which helps students to engage in learning activities and gain more experience from the learning process. It moves from the control of the teacher to the student's ability to interact with the environment and with others.

Modelling behaviour

As teachers, we model our behaviour according to the principles we are trying to teach. It is up to us to show what it means to be an active participant, to treat others equally and to connect with others.

• This means that we need to consider possible participation issues beforehand and think about how we will create an experience that is valuable to all of our students, regardless of gender, economic background, language skills, religion, etc.
• It means that as soon as we walk into our classrooms, we look for ways to connect with every single student that is present and enable all students to share their perspective. -It is perfectly okay to have a rule that interruptions of others are not allowed when your class is in session, or to set a rule that students are not allowed to have their phones with them in class;
• Stimulate our students by asking higher-order questions and promote dialogue;
• That we reflect on our behaviour, preferences and pitfalls, as it enables us to be mindful of any message we share with our students;
• And that we are consistent when it comes to upholding the set of shared principles. Every single student at school or in class should know that as teachers, we follow up on our word.