About WELT Center | World-citizenship education and WELT projects

World Education Learning for Tomorrow – WELT – is rooted in world-systems analysis and critical pedagogy and is aimed at improving the quality of secondary education by strengthening its core objective: helping youth become critical world-citizens.

By critical we don’t just mean well-informed or having critical thinking skills, but rather consciously taking position in the social action field. By world-citizenship we don’t mean feeling equally at home everywhere but knowing one lives in an unequally developing world-system where justice is also a global issue and freedom depends on participation at multiple political levels, from the local to the global.

To this end the WELT Center promotes WELT projects in schools, publishes the quarterly magazine Spirit and organizes the Citizenship Olympiad.

WELT PROJECTS

Project work in school is often considered to be extra or just fun more than solid learning. This is only partly true, when project work is too often used as a didactic in single school subjects – costing too much time to prepare and execute or being a far too self-regulating type of learning activity for too many pupils. But as a cross-curricular team teaching method, project work can certainly be a solution to several school- and learning problems. Applying a specific approach to integral learning and by working together with civil society organisations on topics that clarify the importance of taking a position on the main fault lines that divide society, the WELT projects show how to efficiently combine all school subjects of a year or grade by their own expertise for about 10% of the schoolyear. That way WELT projects integrate all school factors that influence civic education and increase the quality of education in several areas:

citizenship and transversal competences get included in a coherent view on education that is also clearly visible in school practice
team spirit is enhanced by professional project work
the development of the community/extended school is supported
the horizontal and vertical coherence of the school curriculum is strengthened
the efficiency and effectiveness of the learning process improve

The main social fault lines WELT projects try to illuminate are:

Open vs. closed society (topics e.g. refugees, migration)
Capital vs. labor (topics e.g. maximum income, social security)
Green economy vs. system change (topics e.g. climate change, waste)

The WELT method was developed in Saey M., 2014, Jongeren worden wereldburgers (Youth become world-citizens), AcademiaPress/Lannoo, to help solve the democratic citzenship deficit in Flanders’ educational systems. It was the object of practical research in schools for AP University College Antwerp in 2019-2020, became official policy of the Antwerp city educational system in 2020, and won several awards including first prizes at international filmfestivals for the WELT documentary “Youth City Hall”. From 2021 until 2027 AP University College Antwerp organized a WELT Designlab where interdisciplinary groups of students of all teacher trainings (secondary education) prepared projects for schools – minimizing the time needed in schools to set up the projects and learning how team teaching for world-citizenship is the main objective of education.

Applying the method cross-schools WELT can also help bridge education and participation in the democratic processes of towns and cities. This is what the second generation WELT projects is about, strengthening the agonistic democratic ethos. On weltcenter.org one can find manuals and several examples.

The WELT Center can

provide a study day for schools wanting to adopt the method
help teacher training programs to include a WELT designlab
aid cities in developing their democratic fabric through cross-school world-citizenship education.

Schools that organise at least one WELT project for each grade on campus can receive the title of “WELT School” to underscore the education for democracy and world-citizenship objective.

A ticket to an online screening of the documentary film “Youth City Hall” can also be found on this website.

The SPIRIT journal

Today the curve of democracy is going down. In many countries human rights and the rule of law are increasingly under pressure. U.S. hegemony is ending, upending the post-World War international order while the historical social system in which we live reaches its limits. It’s a time when all democratic institutions should try and uphold what is still good, when all democratic world-citizens should push for a more equal and ecological sustainable world, when all worldviews, religious and non-religious, should look for pathways to help build that future. Also, especially, in education.

The international WELT quarterly magazine “Spirit” intends to stimulate and support exactly that. It brings worldview- and citizenshipeducation together in a post-secular effort to help uphold the democratic ethos of critical teaching for world-citizenship.

Every edition is organized around a central social problem, analysed in a scientific paper and discussed by scolars in an inter-worldview dialogue. To inform worldview- or citizenship teaching in several school subjects like history, religion, civics, geography, economics or through cross-curricular approaches including theoretical and practical courses. Interviews, book reviews, field reports, slampoetry and other immediately usable teaching materials illustrate or apply the main insights. An (in class written) essay contest for pupils on the central topic of the previous edition serves as both repetition and evaluation.

On the Spirit website one can subscribe as an individual or a school or one can make a generous donation.

THE CITIZENSHIP OLYMPIAD

The WELT Center created the Citizenship Olympiad for cross-disciplinary projects on (world-)citizenship. A first edition was halted by the covid pandemic but the relaunch is on the near horizon.

The olympiad wants to promote teaching for critical world-citzenship as the main objective of education. Any secondary school can send in its best project, which will be examined by a jury of professors and lecturers in teacher training programs of different universities and university colleges.

The olympiad is held at the end of the school year at AP University College Antwerp where the ten best projects represent their school and trajectory before the jury and the wider audience of friends, family, classmates and education professionals.

More information on dates, criteria and subscriptions will appear on the Citizenship Olympiad website.

THE WELT CENTER

The WELT Center is the platform for all projects and developments relating to the WELT program for teaching for critical world-citizenship.

The center is coördinated by Mark Saey, philosopher and author of Wereld-systeemanalyse. Een antwoord op 1968 (IMAVO) (World-systems analysis. An answer to 1968) and Jongeren worden wereldburgers (Academia Press) (Youth become world-citizens). He is a Lecturer at AP University College Antwerp where he teaches a.o. philosophy, citizenship, economics and environment, and interworldview dialogue. He has 20 years of experience as a teacher of philosophy and ethics in the Flemish public education system, worked for several years as a project supervisor for citizenship in the Antwerp educational system, and was a member of several curriculum committees for school subjects relating to worldview- and citizenship education.

The WELT Center website and connected websites are developed by MaakiProduction. The center also collaborates with MaakiProduction on educational filmprojects and the Spirit journal.

For more info on the WELT Center and ways to collaborate: info@weltcenter.org.