Young journalists grow up. EUPress: a European awareness training project.

We live in a complex and interdependent world. Which can no longer be observed through the lens of what Ulrich Beck called “methodological nationalism,” that is, with the prejudice that only at the national level are there levers to guide societies and economies toward goals of sustainable development, human capital growth, and social justice.

“The perspective can only be multilevel, from local to global. And the sooner one acquires an awareness of this articulation on a multiplicity of levels of governance of societies, the sooner one becomes a citizen capable of interpreting reality and guiding it in complexity.” It is from these premises, about which the academic coordinator, Prof. Fabio Masini, spoke to us, that the idea – judged worthy of funding by the EU – of the Erasmus+ EUPress project, in which the University of Roma Tre is the lead partner with five schools from four countries: Rome and Arezzo (for Italy), Warsaw (Poland), Almeira (Spain), and Timisoara (Romania), originated.

The main objective of the project is to co-design with teachers from schools in the partner countries pathways to raise students’ awareness of evolving, institutional and policy dynamics at the European level, set within the broader and changing framework of international economic and political relations.

Teacher training workshops, dissemination workshops directed at students and moments of joint planning are planned, resulting in a summer-school, a full immersion that will be organized in 2024 on the island of Ventotene, a symbolic place of European construction.

After the training part, the project will focus on making young students from partner schools acquire methodologies and techniques to form a journalistic type of communication perspective. “This need arises from the need to have a class of journalists who are increasingly informed and aware with respect to the issues of the European Union and international relations,” Prof. Masini again suggests to us, “these are skills that are difficult to find in the media world today; and yet these are necessary approaches to interpret the context in which our daily lives take place.”

The project, which began in December this year, will run until November 2025 and has already seen an initial moment of joint reflection among the partners, who met in an online kick-off meeting in the middle of the month to define the concrete next steps of the training. The next coordination meeting will be held in attendance in Almeria in spring 2023.

“This is a complex bet, but it is also the only one worth pursuing to better equip the European citizens of tomorrow,” affirmed Prof. Natalia Notulak from the Warsaw School. While Prof. Antonella Fatai, from the Liceo Petrarca in Arezzo, was keen to emphasize that the project is also being carried out thanks to the active help of Cesue and Euractiv Italia, which will ensure media coverage of its various activities.