What are the strategic options we have nationally and internationally in promoting consumer education? How may we, with small resources, get results? How may international cooperation give help and direction to national tasks? What are the keys in an upstream or downstream strategy? In this article, we will discuss the different strategic options for developing and implementing consumer education on the basis of established priorities under the Nordic Council of Ministers. We will also try to give comments on how EU implements Article 153 in the Amsterdam treaty in this respect.
by Marianne Ørberg, The Swedish Consumer Agency
Ole-Erik Yrvin, Norwegian Ministry of Children and Family Affairs.
European Conference Home Economics in the New Millennium - from a cultural, consumer and health perspective. Oslo, November 2000.
For use internationally and nationally we have developed a joint Nordic "Proposal of objectives for and content of consumer education in the compulsory school and upper secondary school level in the Nordic countries".
Precise curriculum documents, such as this, are especially useful because they define sharply the content of consumer education, at a level of ambition adopted to what the school system should be able to manage. Our main feedback to the Nordic document is its usefulness just in that sense, as exact proposals in national curriculum, teacher education, and at each school and to each teacher. For consumer organisations and school authorities it further constitutes a checklist for evaluating the status of consumer education within each country, for central and local curriculum, schoolbooks, the teaching in each school, and even the pupils. Internationally the documents may be used for comparisons between countries, and as a common platform or ambition in relation to realising § 153 in the cooperation within the EU.
In principle we have two directions of working - upstream or downstream. Seen downstream we may start from the level of international or national policy documents concerning consumer education at the top of the figure below, and move downwards through to distributing consumer material to the schools.
When national policy documents give basis for implementing consumer education objectives, the next task is to see to that national guidebooks are available, that teacher training is in line with the national priorities and that publishers textbooks are up to date and so forth.
The other approach is to start where there we make our own relevant teaching material for distribution to interested schools. This is the most usual starting point for the following reason. It seems as an easy and practicable starting point for most consumer organisations. But our experience is that one meets a capacity problem, the school system becomes to complicated - or personal networks are not enough to give the expected long-term results. Then it becomes urgent to enter the Internet, the publishers' textbooks and engage in teachers in service training and the teachers' teachers at the university colleges. This is the bottom up perspective.
In some countries curriculum is decentralised to regions, municipality or to each school. Then local curriculum becomes the target. And the bottom up way of working becomes the most realistic, but also a strenuous way upwards.
It is in a way more rewarding to start at the top, getting consumer education into the national curriculum. The competition for introducing and maintaining topics is stiff and the school system already feels overloaded with different expectations. Both Iceland, Norway as well as the Netherlands have good examples in their curriculum. Even the bottom up perspective is easier if the activities have support in national, regional or local curriculum or educational policies.
Sweden has a decentralised school system, and the Swedish Consumer Agency priority is to work from the consumer material and Internet level. It is recognised by their Nordic colleagues that the Swedes have the broadest and most well prepared material in their schools among the Nordic countries. Norway has a detailed national curriculum, and has developed, and translated, a broader set of national policy and curriculum documents.
Curriculum development is important. We register that our Baltic colleagues in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania want a closer Baltic-Nordic cooperation in this specific field, as Mr. Sulev Valdemaa from Estonia underlines in his rapport to the conference. Before this conference, we have had a meeting planning this cooperation. We want to start the cooperation, hopefully, in Vilnius next spring. The decision is to be taken by different bodies of the Nordic Ministerial Council the coming months, which makes it, at present, the time of the start of this project somewhat uncertain.
International cooperation is dependent on finding a common agenda that binds different countries together. With reference to the illustration above, the top-bottom and bottom-top strategies meet in the middle with the key word teacher training as the common denominator.
The Nordic network for consumer education discussed in May last year how we may contribute to the international efforts, and especially in relation to DG SANCO. Our conclusion was:
"We think that our Nordic contribution should concentrate on strategy making and implementation of consumers education in teacher training on the levels of basic training, in service training and graduate training, also using distance education methods. There is also a need for development of commentaries of syllabi concerning consumer aspects. From our experiences, teacher training is well suited for international co-operation, because it is rather unaffected by differences in how the school system in general is organised in each country. Transfer of experience and solutions is therefore more open."
We see two doors to the Commission. First, DG SANCO, which has Consumer Education on the agenda, as lined out in the article from Mr. João Tàtá dos Anjos, and secondly, the Socrates, Comenius 2.1 programme under DG CULTURE AND EDUCATION.
We are preparing a project for application to the Socrates programme 1st of March next year under the title "Consumer education and teacher training: Developing consumer citizenship". Institutions in Portugal, UK, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Iceland and Norway are behind the project. This enables the two DGs to support each other's priorities.
The main topic of the project is, as the leader of the project preparations Ms. Victoria Thoresen explains: How can consumer education contribute to a wider vision of the consumer as an active, responsible participant in the development of a just and safe world? In what ways does the exercise of citizenship include the practice of dependent consciences, critical choices in the marketplace? To what extent are lifestyles, which neither limit the development of other human beings nor destroy the world's environment prerequisites for being a good citizen?
To accomplish this, the participants in the project will work with defining concepts, analysing and creating curricula, developing and evaluating teaching plans and materials, and preparing strategies. The project should to produce a prototype for an interdisciplinary consumer education curriculum for teacher training based on consumer citizenship. It also intends to create interdisciplinary teaching plans, learning materials and teaching methods for use in teacher training as well as strategy plans for nationwide implementation.
As foundation for the discussions in the Nordic network we have used the document "The European Community and The Consumer Education" produced to the meeting in the Group of National Experts in the Consumer Education in Brussels, December 1999. The document is very instructive, precise, short and recommended for reading. It also gives an opportunity to analyse the profile of the Commission's efforts in consumer education: To see where projects have given results, where there are initiatives pending and which future needs there are for action. That is the way we try to use this document from December 1999. We have also made a supplemented version of the document and proposed some future priorities and specifications, for instance
From the Nordic side we have to stress that our possibilities to engage ourselves on the international level, are limited to engage in teacher training, our Baltic relations and the future of NICE-Mail. We see this periodical as a very important joint European task in content and language covering both Northern and Southern Europe.
That leaves the December '99 document and even our supplementary proposals positively open for initiatives and actions for countries and organisations all over Europe.
In consumer education, there is no reason to wait!
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