Ethical and civic values through eTwinning in Initial Teacher Training. Curriculum design for Primary Education

Education in values is a core element of European policies and, thus, included in common legal educational reference documents and national curricula. The promotion of values and their teaching from early childhood education help address current pressing social and political issues, especially by building resilience to radicalization leading to conflictive situations, violent extremism, wars and armed conflicts or polarization. Intercultural Communicative Competence is essential to appreciate one’s own culture and understand the others’ culture avoiding prejudices and stereotypes, or negative judgment (usually connected to biases) and adjusting linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements during communication accordingly. eTwinning is a safe, free, European platform to develop transnational collaborative projects among two or more European centers putting real teachers and students from different countries in contact. Considering this, this paper shows the results of the research on interculturality and a transnational cooperative project under the umbrella of an eTwinning project between Sweden and Spain on how to teach democratic values in Primary Education among future teachers of such stage. First, student teachers had to reflect on how they understood each assigned democratic value and created a 45-minute lesson teaching such value for Primary Education and then completed a digital form to reflect and evaluate the project itself and their gains in terms of European, democratic values and interculturality awareness. The findings allow understanding the selected values (forgiveness, inclusion, kindness, love, respect and unselfishness) under each country’s perspective and curricula and ascertain strengths and weaknesses of this kind of project and interculturality development.