Teaching European contents in Slovenian Schools, 2018

In 2019 Slovenia celebrated 15th anniversary of its membership in the European Union (EU). In the same year elections to the European Parliament took place. While scientific and professional literature criticises the European Union for the presence of democratic deficit and distance from European citizens (e.g. Kratochvíl and Sychra, 2019; Papadopoulos and Piattoni, 2019). In terms of EU democracy, data on voter turnout are also worrying, as it has been steadily declining since 1979, when the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held. Numerous studies (e.g. Hayo, 1999; Thorpe, 2008; Kerr et al., 2010) have shown an association of high levels of citizenship knowledge of the EU with positive attitudes towards the EU and social and (intended) political participation. As the school environment represents an important, though not the only, environment for acquiring citizenship knowledge of the EU, these facts raise a number of research questions about learning and teaching European content in schools. The aim of the research was to analyse in depth the views of teachers on different aspects of learning and teaching European content in Slovenian schools (e.g. goals, accessibility and quality of materials and vocational training, presence in curricula and extracurricular activities) and the challenges they face. With this study, we learned more about how and which European content is taught in Slovenian schools.