Conference Agenda

The aggravation of political conflicts in the context of the disproportion in the socio-economic development of the countries of the world led to a record forced migration of the population. The diversity of cultures and religions, the level of education and other personal characteristics of forced migrants, including their age characteristics - are all factors influencing the process of adaptation and socialization of migrants in host countries (UNESCO, 2022). Highly developed countries, and this is only 1/5 of the countries receiving forced migrants (UNHCR, 2022), are actively developing the concept of Lifelong Learning. According to the Lifelong learning opportunities for all: medium-term strategy 2022–2029 by UNESCO (UNESCO, 2022), mutual learning in a community should be a strategic objective for every local government.

During last 10 years the migrant’s integration policy in England has been aimed at "community cohesion”. At the same moment there were some arguments that multiculturalism has failed, and migrants who do not speak English or do not want to integrate have created "a kind of discomfort and disunity" in British communities. In contrast, the Scottish Government work on migrant integration and welcome them to become an equal part of society. Meanwhile, 2022 became a year of the highest net migration figure ever recorded - 10 million people came to Great Britain (Immigration Statistics, 2022). This increase has resulted in pressures being put on various services including Education (Hepburn, 2020).

The universities take an active position in attracting and training migrants in the age group 18-35 (Hillman N., 2022) and develop a number of initiatives which promote accessibility for displaced people, supporting inclusivity and providing a safe environment for refugees and asylum seekers (UofG, 2022). The local authorities provide language courses for migrants – English for Speakers of Other Languages (Draft Refugee Integration Strategy, 2022) and cooperate with volunteering organizations in local communities to increase the level of socialization of new commers.

At the same moment, 40+ age group has to go through the long lasting process of qualification recognition and goes to the labor market after ESOL courses with a potential decrease in social status doing sometimes unskilled work. The 65+ age group is forced to integrate to the new society through family learning (Future of an Ageing Population) and develop intergenerational learning which let them to overcome the situational and dispositional barriers in education (K. Patricia Cross's,2014)

The solution to the growing problem of declining general literacy levels of the population because of the migrants could be the excysting University of the Third Age (U3A). Supporting by the local authorities they could provide an equal footing with existing courses the acquisition of new qualifications by forced migrant and help them to become an equal part of the society.

Intergenerational learning (IGL) should offer a solution for societal problems in order to support lifelong and life-wide learning as well as maintain and build human and social capital simultaneously (FIM-New Learning, 2008). A change that involves sharing one’s skills and knowledge carries the opportunity for personal development, as teaching is always a form of learning (Vygotsky, 1997).

Some studies have emphasized the importance of learning activities between non-adjacent generations (Tambaum, 2021).

The talents and resources help to build community identity and decreases IGL estrangement as each party can recognize the other’s contributions to the community (Buffel.T., al., 2014).

The concept of IGL has not yet been developed enough to be included as an output of the community development strategies. However, the implementation of the IGL concept at the U3A level can bring them to help in the professional organization of intergenerational learning.

The very recent Dublin Declaration defines Global Education as "education that enables people to reflect critically on the world and their place in it" (GENE, 2022, p. 2). This is a fundamental education in an increasingly interconnected world, where the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and war in Europe are just some of the glaring examples of the challenges humanity is called upon to interface with. Awareness of the responsibility for active participation on the part of everyone is therefore more crucial than ever (UNESCO, 2014).

The research project aims at analysing the Italian context of Universal Civil Service Abroad (Servizio Civile Universale all’estero) as a non-formal learning context from the perspective of Global Citizenship Education (GCE). The Universal Civil Service Abroad (SCU) consists of an experience aimed at young people aged between 18 and 28 years to spend a year of their life abroad collaborating in an international cooperation project managed by NGOs. The SCU programme originated as an alternative to compulsory military service for those who exercised conscientious objection and has now assumed a voluntary nature (Fabbri et al., 2017).

The choice of this context for the research is motivated by the fact that the need to better understand the potential of non-formal educational contexts as places of GCE has been noted in the literature (Le Bourdon, 2018). Furthermore, the aforementioned Dublin Declaration (GENE, 2022, p. 2) contains an explicit reference to non-formal learning contexts as potentially rich educational settings for GCE.

The research aims to investigate possible elements of “global awareness” emerging from young adults during their SCU experience abroad.

The key concept of the research is that of "global awareness" and is intentionally not rigidly defined in advance. However, this does not mean that the choice of this term does not derive from a clear positioning with respect to the research perspective. In fact, the use of the term “global awareness” instead of “global competencies” brings with it a critical perspective of GCE that looks at the object by attempting to disrupt a view exclusively linked to a dominant thought (Andreotti et al., 2019; de Sousa Santos, 2008). Moreover, the research has its theoretical basis in the pedagogy of the oppressed of Freire, which highlights the need for a humanisation process linked to the conquest of freedom that is closely interconnected with responsibility and conscientization oriented towards a process of transformation of reality (Freire, 2000). From this perspective, GCE is therefore closely linked to the individual's reflexive-critical capacity to interpret reality aimed at an action of change.

In particular, the study is oriented towards capturing the emergence of GCE elements during the SCU experience abroad in the presence of significant situations. This viewpoint is anchored in the idea of the encounter between the subject "in" and "with" the world described by Biesta (2021). The scholar describes this encounter as a "call" that the world makes to the subject by means of the situations that the subject finds himself experiencing: the perspective is that of a world seen not only as a functional instrument to fulfil the subject's desires but rather as a world that "calls" and "asks" something of the subject through life situations. The subject is clearly free to respond or not to this 'call' of the world, but according to Biesta, it is precisely in this encounter that the subject makes with the world that he or she meets and understands what it means to exist.