Recently EWC Executive Director Ana Perona-Fjeldstad and Special Adviser Gunnar Mandt met with the Polish Deputy Minister of National Education, Krzysztof Stanowski in Warsaw, Poland to discuss the possibility of organizing a summer academy in Warsaw, a joint project between the Polish Ministry of National Education, the National In-Service Teacher Training Centre in Poland and the EWC.

The Global Education & Youth programme of the North-South Centre (NSC) has, since 1999, been organising the Global Education Week (GEW), an annual decentralised event encouraging global education awareness-raising activities within educational and youth settings in the Council of Europe’s (CoE) member States.

The final conference of the Council of Europe project “Policies and Practices for Teaching Sociocultural Diversity” took place last week in Oslo, Norway. In her official welcome address, Ms Tora Aasland, Minister of Research and Higher Education of Norway presented the European Wergeland Centre as an important resource centre in the field.

EWC staff members attended EDEN's Seventh Open Classroom Conference: The European School 2.0 that took place 15-17 October. It was a fruitful workshop where teachers, education experts and policy-makers discussed open educational resources, combined with social software (Web 2.0 and 3.0) as emerging critical instruments for innovative (lifelong) learning.

Ethics and Religious Culture is a new course taught in all elementary and high schools in Quebec province, Canada. It replaced denominationally based forms of religious education in public schools and is compulsory in all schools, private as well as public. In order to place the course in an international context, an international symposium for educators, scholars and policymakers was held by McGill University’s Faculties of Education and Religious Studies on October 2nd 2009.