Primary and Secondary school students in Chile will take on transparency and access to information in the classroom
Chile's Council for Transparency and EUROsociAL promote a workshop to position in the academic world the need to educate students in the country on the right of access to public information held by all citizens
Currently the theme of civic education is gaining importance in Chile in a context of high and growing mistrust of public institutions by citizens and public discussion of the need for constitutional changes.
In this context, the Council for Transparency (CPLT), with the support of the European Union's programme for social cohesion, EUROsociAL, organised a Training Seminar on Citizenship and Transparency jointly with Chile's Catholic University in order to position the issue of transparency and access to public information in the academic and university world as an important theme within Civic Education.
The president of the Council for Transparency, Vivianne Blanlot, inaugurated the activity. "Given the situation in Chile, where the Access to Public Information Act does not indicate the responsibilities of the Ministry of Education for incorporating this subject area into educational processes, we have taken on the task of doing outreach and working to have a technical impact in institutions linked to education to achieve this positioning and to address this citizen right", explained the CPLT president in her speech.
The different sessions and workshops sought to provide conceptual elements on how to understand citizenship in a democratic society, how to work on citizenship themes in educational processes (teaching aspects in civic education), and relating these to the role played by the right of access to information as a citizen instrument for social control of public administration.
The event included the participation of representatives of the Education Department of Chile's Pontifical Catholic University, civil servants from the CPLT's Promotion and Clients Unit, European Union representatives in Chile, and academics from the University of Barcelona.
Since June 2015, EUROsociAL has been supporting the CPLT in the process of preparing teaching guides for working on the theme in secondary education. The guides, which have incorporated the inputs from the seminar and Chile's Ministry of Education and Culture, will be presented before the end of the year.
This EUROsociAL working line is coordinated by FIIAPP.
CPLT/FIIAPP
