TY3 – Section 1 – Introduction

This video is AI generated. The script was written by Dr Philip Murphy, University College Cork, Ireland.

Welcome to Lesson 3 of this Introduction to the EU. It focuses on students’ political identity and sense of community. As social animals we think of ourselves as part of a community or communities. We have varying senses of attachment to our local village, town, or county. Whether your students are rooted in Clare, Carlow, Cork or another county, they are also rooted in the EU. Many wear their national identity as a badge of pride. As residents in an EU member state, they are simultaneously EU citizens. Do they ever think of themselves as European? Is it possible to have an attachment to both?

The aim of this lesson is that students consider their political identity and reflect on what influences their sense of identity. How relevant are geography, politics, culture, sport, language, or other factors in building political identity? The lesson builds on the Global Citizenship and Meaning of Democracy strands in the CSPE curriculum and is a primer for the Active Citizenship, and Globalisation and Localisation, strands in the Politics and Society curriculum.

The lesson opens with a positioning exercise where students locate themselves relative to geopolitical communities. The second exercise tasks students to identify the extent to which they have practical experience of Europe, be it through travel, family ties, language, culture, or migration. The lesson contains information from recent adult surveys as an insight of how attachment to country and to the EU varies, in Ireland and in other EU states. These exercises and the follow-up discussion topics provide you and your students with an opportunity to unwind the strands of their socio-political identity. Through hearing classmates’ contributions and analysing the survey graphs in the presentation, you can help your students explore the factors that mould their sense of identity, and the possible of having multiple identities. Appreciating the nature of these differences is a step to considering the relevance of their dual national and European identity.

The lesson content is intended as merely a template, that you adjust in structure, content, instructions, or delivery, to best suit your teaching need or student group. You might add local town or village as a community option in the positioning exercise. Or you could use the AV clips in the final slide of the presentation as a starter for a Think-Pair-Share exercise earlier in the lesson. If the classroom setting allows, the positioning exercise can be run as a physical runway for visual impact. You’re welcome to insert any of the content in the Resources tab document or links for your delivery of the lesson.

Section 2 contains a presentation template, which you can download and edit to run the lesson. It includes instructions for yourself and students. Section 3 contains a Resources tab with links to AV clips and relevant survey data. If you have a query, don’t hesitate to contact us at dabtheeu@ucc.ie.